The 13 students, trainees from the Cell and Tissue Engineering Program (CTEng) supported by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Science and based in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, visited the South San Francisco headquarters of Genentech, the company often credited with launching the biotech industry.

Though the trip was a blur – Tuesday evening arrival, Wednesday tour of Genentech, Wednesday night flight back to Atlanta – it was a red-eye opening experience that left a deep impression on the students.

“I didn’t realize how much of an academic environment there was,” says Alexandra Atalis, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “For one thing, they have a postdoc program.”

The Georgia Tech group, which featured seven bioengineering students and six biomedical engineering students, heard presentations about the company’s research as well as its rich history. The company was founded in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert Swanson and biochemist Herbert Boyer after Swanson had learned about the recombinant DNA technology pioneered by Boyer and geneticist Stanley Cohen.

The students also got a tour of the facility, “and that was cool to see,” says Erin Edwards, a bioengineering Ph.D. student. “They had a fully-automated testing system – robots transferring nanoscale samples through a variety of assays. But we also saw familiar things like microscopy facilities that are similar to what we’re used to at Georgia Tech. It illustrated to me how far out on the cutting edge we are at Tech.”

Like Atalis, Edwards was impressed with the academic-like atmosphere at Genentech, which is not typical in an industry setting, according to CTEng Director Andrés García, professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and a Petit Institute faculty member.

“They’re not just interested in developing a pipeline. There’s a big focus on research and a push to publish in academic journals,” Edwards says. “It’s nice to see that there’s an opportunity to do basic research in an industry setting.”

The Georgia Tech group began the day with a Genentech history lesson. In the early 1970s, biochemist Herbert Boyer and geneticist Stanley Cohen pioneered a new scientific field called recombinant DNA technology. After hearing about this development, Swanson called Boyer and what was supposed to be a 10-minute meeting turned into three hours. When they were finished, Genentech was born. 

Then the students received “a presentation geared toward research, something we’re used to hearing,” says Edwards, who works in the lab of Petit Institute researcher Susan Thomas. “But we also were exposed to things we don’t see very often – robots that transfer small nanoscale samples through a variety of testing. That was a cool thing to see, a fully automated assembly line.”

There was a personal connection to Genentech for Atalis, who is interested in cancer immunotherapy and works in the lab of Petit Institute faculty member Krishnendu Roy, a Coulter Department professor whose focus is on immunoengineering. Much of Genentech’s research is in immunology. 

“Monoclonal antibody therapy is one of their main areas of focus,” says Atalis, referring to Avastin, a leading cancer drug made by Genentech. “My mother, who has been battling ovarian cancer for the past five years, recently used Avastin as part of her drug regimen. So, going behind the scenes at the company that makes this important drug had a deep personal meaning for me.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience 

For teams affiliated with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), these projects focused on improving human health while also filling a commercial niche.

The BME projects ranged far and wide – innovative diagnostics for different conditions, like apnea, HIV and heart defects; improved surgical tools for a variety of procedures; assistive mobility devices for children with cerebral palsy; and two that earned awards at the event, which was held on Thursday, Dec. 3, in the McCamish Pavilion.

Even the team that earned the best overall project award, comprised entirely of mechanical engineering students, focused on health care. The team, Need a Hand, developed improved 3D printed prosthetic limbs for charities serving amputees injured in the Sudan Civil War.

The two award-winning Coulter Department teams were Cold and Bold, which won the interdisciplinary award for its cold cap to prevent hair loss for patients undergoing chemotherapy, and Nasaid, which took top honors in the biomedical engineering category.

Capstone projects are a requirement for senior engineering students, but for Team Cold and Bold, there was a bit more inspiration driving their project. 

“I was inspired because my brother was diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago,” says Ben Braun, one of two mechanical engineering students on the team along with Curry Isiminger. The other team members were BME students, Kyla Merson and Alexandra Richardson.

“I watched [my brother] lose his hair and sense of identity during his battle,” Braun says. “I want nothing more than to provide those facing the same problem a better option.”

A hair-saving method for cancer patients, utilizing a ‘cold cap,’ has been widely used in Europe and a growing number of patients in the U.S. are using the scalp-freezing treatment. 

But, says Braun, “the current leading solution is expensive, uncomfortable and prone to user error.”

Team Cold and Bold utilized solid state active cooling and implemented an autonomous control system to provide a better option for those facing hair loss during chemotherapy. 

“Our goal was to design a nasal aspirator for infants that is easy to handle and clean but still gets the job done,” says Sudarsan Pranatharthikaran, one of six biomedical engineers on Team Nasaid. His teammates are Ankit Raghuram, Siddhant Chawla, Suhaas Anbazhakan, Young Kyoung Kim, and Catherine Gu.

“The inspiration of our design really starts with the current trend of wearable technology,” says Prantharthikaran, whose team applied the ease of use and control of a wearable device to nasal aspiration by creating an electric nasal aspirator that can be worn on one finger, leaving the other hand available to gently hold the baby while using the suction device.

“We expect parents to go through the nasal suction process quickly without any hassle like with some of the other products on the market,” he says.

James Rains, director of Capstone for the Coulter Department, is continuously amazed at what he says is, “the impact that these students are able to make on society. They confront relevant problems in the world and help bring hope, healing and comfort to those who need it most.”

Both of these award-winning teams plan to keep the momentum going.

Team Nasaid has filed a provisional patent and hopes to participate in Georgia Tech’s InVenture competition during spring semester.

According to Richardson and Team Cold and Bold, they have a provisional patent and are exploring options to take their cold cap to market.

For Braun, a commercial hit in the marketplace would be nice. But ultimately, he sees Cold and Bold’s success as a kind of testament to his brother, who lost his battle. 

“I will never have him back,” says Braun. “But if I can help people deal with what he went through, a little bit of him lives on.”

READ MORE:

Info about every Capstone team can be found here.

Check out the news story about the Expo here.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Knowing the precise location of hydrogen peroxide within cells could help scientists gain a better understanding of oxidation-reduction reactions taking place there. The sensor was developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who have demonstrated several applications for its ability to spatially resolve the chemical’s presence inside cells.

Known as HyPer-Tau, the new sensor modifies a commercially-available protein that alters its fluorescence properties in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The research, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, was reported November 20 in the journal Scientific Reports.

“The chemistry of cells, unlike more traditional chemistry in test tubes, is highly dependent on where a chemical reaction is occurring,” said Christine Payne, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and one of the paper’s senior authors. “HyPer-Tau is a tool that will provide us with information on the ‘where’ and ‘when’ for hydrogen peroxide inside living cells.”

Until development of the new technique, hydrogen peroxide sensors could only tag certain components of cells, or show that the cells contained the oxidant. To understand the role of hydrogen peroxide in signaling and oxidation, however, the researchers wanted to know the time-resolved location of the chemical.

“We needed a tool that could discriminate between locations to provide more than a whole readout of oxidation,” said Melissa Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “With very specific spatial information, we could be better informed about how cellular processes or therapies involving oxidation are going to operate.”

Kemp and Payne realized that if they could anchor the reporter protein to microtubules – fibrous structures that crisscross cells like railroad tracks – they might obtain the location information they needed.

Other researchers had already created variants of the HyPer reporter protein, so the researchers – with technician Emilie Warren, undergraduate researcher Tatiana Netterfield and postdoctoral researcher Saheli Sarkar – set out to create a new tool. They added a tubulin-binding protein known as Tau, that connects the HyPer protein to the microtubule structures. Fluorescence microscopy then allowed them to observe the real-time change in fluorescence as oxidation occurred in the cells they were studying.

“Connecting the reporter protein allows us to get a grid-type readout of oxidation going on inside the cells,” said Kemp. “By having the protein tethered, we can get very specific sub-cellular information. You can readily see areas with more intense oxidation.”

She used a traffic analogy to compare information provided by the new technique to that provided by the earlier one. Earlier sensors would have reported that traffic in a downtown area was congested, while the new sensor could pinpoint an accident on a specific street causing the delays. The latter information allows specific action to be taken, Kemp said.

Kemp and Payne have already used the tool to visualize the signaling process that takes place as macrophages discover bacteria and move to engulf and destroy the invaders.

“When the macrophages are activated, they begin shooting out tiny leg-like structures that seek the bacterial signal,” explained Kemp. “To do so, they require hydrogen peroxide to control the migration and other activities. We can see in these leading edges where the oxidation is occurring inside the cells, providing an unprecedented view of the behavior.”

By combining multiple images, the researchers produced movies correlating the production of hydrogen peroxide to the activities of the immune system cells.

In another application, the sensor was used to study how cells respond to the introduction of extracellular hydrogen peroxide, which produces a wave of oxidation as it moves through the cellular structures.

“This provides a way to quantify both intracellular and intercellular variation that is occurring,” Kemp explained. “Our goal is to be able to monitor in real-time the events that are occurring. Because of the spectral features of the reporter, you can couple this with other types of dyes to monitor organelles and different types of production.”

Kemp hopes to use the new sensor to better understand oxidation of another type of immune cell, T cells, as they form contact with other cells to recognize the presence of viruses. In studies that could be important to understanding the effects of nanoscale materials on living cells, the researchers are working to understand the suspected oxidative impacts of titanium dioxide nanoparticles. The new technique could also be useful in understanding how stem cells change oxidation properties during differentiation into other cell types.

In current research, Netterfield is working with Kemp and Payne to combine the existing technique with other reporter proteins to gain additional information.

Once thought to be a sign of disease processes, hydrogen peroxide is now understood to be a critical signaling chemical inside cells, Kemp noted. Cells purposely produce the chemical, which can quickly oxidize proteins to alter their functions. Hydrogen peroxide is also generated at sites of inflammation, and as macrophages destroy pathogens.

Collaboration between Payne – a physical chemist – and Kemp – a biomedical engineer, demonstrates how innovation can occur at the intersections of disciplines.

“Chemistry and biomedical engineering offer a pretty natural collaboration,” said Payne. “We both speak the same science language and have a shared interest in developing new tools to enable new science.”

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health Office of the Director and NIAID under grants DP2OD006483-01 and R01AI088023. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

CITATION: Emilie A. K. Warren, Tatiana S. Netterfield, Saheli Sarkar, Melissa L. Kemp and Christine K. Payne, “Spatially-resolved intracellular sensing of hydrogen peroxide in living cells, (Scientific Reports, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep16929

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986)

Writer: John Toon

REM, a sponsor of the summit, is a research partnership including Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Georgia (UGA), and is focused on transforming the treatment of diseases and injuries.

Scientists, students, clinicians, venture capitalists, investors, industry leaders, philanthropists, policy makers, experts in law and ethics, patient advocates – an array of stakeholders in stem cell science and regenerative medicine – will convene at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta for the summit.

"This is a fantastic opportunity that brings together different viewpoints to share the latest in research and commercialization of regenerative medicine therapies," said Johnna Temenoff, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and the co-director of the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine research center.

The summit brings more than 200 international speakers and 65 hours of in-depth programming arranged around thematic tracks that include: “Discovery, Translation & Clinical Trials,” “Regenerative Services & Restorative Medicine,” “Innovation Showcase for Cell Manufacturing,” “Regenerative Engineering & BioBanking,” “Hot Topics & Emerging Trends,” and “Ethics, Law and Society.” 

In addition to compelling keynote speeches, plenary sessions and focus sessions, the three-day event includes the “Conversations with Experts” luncheon, roundtable discussions, a centrally located exhibit hall, the poster forum, and an awards dinner. 

One of the honorees is Dr. Robert Nerem, who led the launch of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues, which has evolved into REM. Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, is being honored with the Leadership Award. 

Nerem, is slated to offer comments during the morning session of the first day, Thursday, Dec. 10, leading off the list of speakers from the three REM institutions, including REM directors Temenoff, Steven Stice (who also leads the Regenerative Bioscience Center at UGA) and Edmund Waller (Emory Winship Cancer Institute).

Attendees of the World Stem Cell Summit also have an opportunity to attend the RegMed Capital Conference, a co-located meeting committed to advancing commercialization and investment opportunities for companies targeting cures. This could be particularly useful for the 18 start-up companies that have emerged from the research of REM lab members.

Currently, REM has more than 70 faculty members from its three institutions working to develop innovative treatments for a variety of diseases in the areas of cancer, neurology, cardiology, orthopedics, and pediatrics. Since 2000, REM has garnered almost $121 million in total funding and its researchers have licensed 25 technologies.

The World Stem Cell Summit and RegMed Capital Conference serve as the flagship gathering of the international stem cell and regenerative medicine community, with the aim of accelerating the discovery and development of lifesaving cures and therapies and bringing together stakeholders to solve global challenges.

In addition to REM, other organizing partners are the Genetics Policy Institute/Regenerative Medicine Foundation (producer of the event), the Mayo Clinic, the Kyoto University Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, BioBridge Global, the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

There’s football, of course – crisp Saturdays at Bobby Dodd Stadium; there are the food trucks, returning in full force like migratory birds along Atlantic Drive and Tech Green; and for the last 11 years, there has been the Biotechnology Career Fair, proactively throwing open windows of opportunity for students and companies alike in one of Georgia Tech’s most anticipated annual events.

“This has become one of those win-win situations, an experience that benefits both students and prospective employers,” says Sally Gerrish, coordinator of the event as director of Student, Alumni and Industry Relations for the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). 

The Coulter Department, a joint department of Emory University and Georgia Tech, served as host of the fair in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building (in September, per usual), bringing 514 students (mostly undergraduates) together with 25 companies that were seeking to fill internships and full-time positions. 

Also, five corporate sponsors supported the effort. The attendance and the number of sponsors were both record highs.

Making all of the moving parts work together at the fair was a committee of 13 students, “who really ran the fair and did a phenomenal job,” Gerrish says. “They’re responsible for everything – recruiting volunteers, contacting industry partners, organizing pre-fair events.”

These pre-fair events are aimed at preparing students for the job search, for building relationships with potential employers. 

“We want students to have a successful experience at the fair,” says Liane Tellier, co-chair of the Career Fair Committee. 

To do that, the committee helps participating students through pre-fair events and info sessions focused on creating resumes, alerting students of the job opportunities at various companies, preparing for interviews, and networking with alumni who have been through all of those drills already. 

“We’d like to ensure that the career fair also offers a wide variety of career options for our qualified student population,” notes Charles Ge, who also co-chaired the committee. 

So this year, the committee assembled a wide range of companies in biotech-related fields, ranging from medical device companies (Medtronic, for example), medical products (like Johnson & Johnson), and institutes of higher education and training (such as Keck Graduate Institute).

In addition to those, the who’s who list of companies and organizations at the fair included C.R. Bard, Becton Dickinson, Chart Industries, Clarkston Consulting, Epic, Eppendorf North America, Halyard Health, Georgia Bio-Emerging Leaders Network, Huron Consulting Group, Pabst Patent Group LLP, Procter & Gamble, QGenda, Sebacia, Inc., Southern Spine LLC, Stryker Orthopaedics, Universal Hospital Services, Inc., and W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc. Sponsoring the event and also on hand were Boston Scientific, PrepMD, St. Jude Medical, T3 Labs and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

“The fair is a wonderful opportunity for companies to visit our university and become aware of the highly talented students that we graduate,” says James Rains, professor of practice and director of the BME Capstone program.

For students, he says, “its a rare opportunity to meet with companies that are competing in the healthcare industry.”

Gerrish remembers when the event drew only 250 students. It’s more than doubled in size, and has grown in scope also, attracting mostly BME students, but also students from almost every other engineering discipline. 

“We have a growing number of students from different majors,” Gerrish says. “ which is great, because this event is really for any student on campus interested in biotechnology,” Gerrish says.

Rains listened closely to company feedback at the event, and was happy to report, “they are amazed to find so many students that are both intelligent and engaging – a rare combination for engineers,” he says. “They also noted that our program is unique because we prepare our students to be immediate contributors within an organization, making them highly attractive as potential hires.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Brown, who is an anesthesiologist and a statistician, affiliated with both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, brought all of it together recently when he delivered the annual Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Lecture in Biomedical Engineering (BME).

“How many people have had anesthesia before?” Brown asked his audience of more than 130 at the Academy of Medicine at the outset of his lecture, entitled, “Deciphering the Dynamics of the Unconscious Brain Under General Anesthesia.”

When about half the people in the room raised their hands, he said, “well, I picked the right topic then.”

Then he spent the next 45 minutes or so presenting his research on what happens to the human brain, at different ages, under anesthesia. Sorting it all out, he said, required “an amalgam of neuroscience, statistics and modeling.”

The work represents an important contribution to neuroscience because historically, “we haven’t taken the study of general anesthesia seriously as a neuroscience discipline, and it very much is,” he said, adding that a more serious approach to studying anesthesiology will not only improve patient care, but lead to a greater understanding of how the brain works and help address other problems in clinical neuroscience.

Along the way, Brown also helped answer another, broader question for Coulter Department Chairman Ravi Bellamkonda.

“People ask me all the time, ‘what do biomedical engineers do,’” said Bellamkonda, who had earlier described the BME department as, “a powerful incubator of ideas.”

Brown’s presentation, he said, was a great example of how different disciplines help spark the knowledge and discovery that keeps the incubator humming with activity. “This talk was a perfect illustration of how technology and math and physics can help us understand something that we think of as biology,” Bellamkonda added.

This year’s lecture provided an opportunity for BME’s growing expertise in neuroscience to step to the forefront, said Garrett Stanley, the BME professor who served as faculty host, and who first met Brown years ago.

At the time, Stanley was just starting his lab at Harvard and a colleague suggested he seek out Brown for some statistical information. Stanley was surprised to discover that Brown was also an anesthesiologist.

“But he was also a serious statistician and mathematician, immersed in the field of neuroscience,” Stanley said. “I’m not a scholar in etymology, but I’m pretty sure that the two words ‘anesthesiologist’ and ‘statistician’ have probably never been concatenated in the history of the English language. I think we can thank Emery for that.”

For his part, Brown took note of the collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach being taken in general at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and specifically within the Coulter Department, a joint department of Georgia Tech and Emory.

“The work here is phenomenal,” he said. “This beautiful integration of medicine and engineering and science, because you’ve brought together two institutions, Georgia Tech and Emory. It’s unique, and the possibilities are boundless.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

That was more than 20 years ago. But in many ways, she never really left Georgia Tech, and the university never lost its grip on her heart and soul.

Inspired by the work of researchers in Tech’s bio-community, especially those affiliated with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), she gave what she could to the university through the years. Her $25 gifts became $100 gifts, and so on. And recently, Marilyn solidified her lasting relationship with Tech, establishing a scholarship that will support non-traditional BME students.

“BME is doing work that will benefit you personally or someone you know,” Marks says. “Basically, they’re doing work that will let loved ones remain vital, and stay alive as long as they live.”

That has become a theme for her life, that notion of being fully alive. In fact, Marks wants the evidence of that on her tombstone (in some far-off future): “While alive, she lived.”

“Of course, that isn’t original with me, but my goodness, what a thought,” she says. “Georgia Tech and BME will last well past my lifetime, and it could have a lasting impact on my children and grandchildren. It’s that important to me.”

Marks came to her realization through hard and heartfelt personal experience. She lost her husband, Ron, to lung cancer almost 10 years ago. Her sister also lost a battle with cancer. Both Marilyn and Ron provided care to their parents late in life, and to Marilyn’s sister. So, she’s seen the toll that an illness can take.

Together with Ron, she made a commitment, “to support areas that can impact a person’s health, quality of life, and longevity. Whether we’re talking about a child with a brain tumor or an octogenarian, you deserve a wonderful quality of life. And whether that means better ways of prevention, intervention, or even treatment of a terminal illness, I want to support that. It’s ingrained in me.”

She’d been collecting articles about research at Georgia Tech and was particularly interested in what was happening in the bio-community. She started giving, a little here, a little there, whatever she could afford. That’s a message she’d like to spread. “It’s a journey,” she says. “Give what you can while you’re alive, while you can decide what is important to you.”

One of the things that has always been important to Marks is the concept of “lifelong learning,” the idea that there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a strict timeline to learning. This also was culled from personal experience.

Her parents moved to this country from Poland in the 1920s, first to New York, then to Atlanta, where they operated a grocery store. Her parents never stopped learning. Her mother knew six languages.

Later on, after Ron retired from a career in advertising, he took college courses for the sheer joy of learning. And Marilyn refers to herself as, “a recycled student. I didn’t get my graduate degree until I’d started working full-time. I understand the concept of having to work to go to school. Some students have to help support their parents, or simply can’t afford college right after high school, and some just aren’t ready for college at 17 or 18.”

So, her gift of $150,000 will support BME undergraduate students who aren’t coming directly from high school, or students who are returning to college. In other words, Marks is helping to fill an important gap in the life of a potential world-changing researcher.

“We are fortunate to count Marilyn Marks amongst our friends,” says Ravi Bellamkonda, who chairs the Coulter Department, a collaborative department of Georgia Tech and Emory. “She has an infectious enthusiasm, and the gift of being a generous of spirit, lifting up everything she touches. Her gift will have a great impact in making BME more accessible to our students.”

BME strives to attract the best, motivated minds, independent of financial status, according to Bellamkonda, who believes that Marks’ generosity helps the department take a step in that direction.

“These are often the forgotten students,” Marks says. “They should not be overlooked. Just think of the lost potential! These are students who some day could make a huge difference in the lives of others.”

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

By Pilar Lagos, UNICEF, Stories of Innovation

On 8 September 2015, Blair Palmer, UNICEF Innovation San Francisco Lab Lead and I chatted with Raja Schaar, Lecturer & Design Instructor at Georgia Tech about her teaching methodologies and how she challenged her students to build wearables keeping social impact in mind.

Raja Schaar created the first prototype course focused on healthcare wearables that will hopefully, in future iterations, become a model for classes taught elsewhere. “Health care presents unique challenges related to regulatory compliance, privacy, and security. This is a fast-moving field, and as opportunities in bioinformatics, telehealth, and device development present themselves, our students need to be positioned to compete and contribute,” Schaar says.

Earlier this year, Schaar travelled to Galway, Ireland to teach a class on “Wearables for Healthcare” as part of a study abroad program. Thirty-two Georgia Tech students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) embarked on the journey too. When Schaar heard about UNICEF’s Wearables for Good design challenge, she encouraged students to submit their ideas.

To her surprise, a team from her class was selected as one of the 10 Wearables for Good challenge finalists. The team, Communic-Aid, designed a wearable device that facilitates record keeping, aids in the tracking of medications that have been distributed in a post-disaster context, and allows the patient to take part in their treatment.

On 19 October 2015, Blair Palmer was invited as guest lecturer at Georgia Tech to talk with undergraduate Biomedical Engineering & Design students about why wearables and sensor technology are part of UNICEF Innovation’s agenda.  She also discussed what it takes to scale technology for good, including the criteria to do so, how budding designers and engineers can think about the context of social impact in their work, and to create things that are not only nice to have, but that people need to have.  

Palmer encouraged students to think beyond the single point of influence in wearable and sensor technology and how to empower users by curating the right data and information insight that sensor technology provide.  She challenged them, “How can you think about what people already use, what they want to use, and how the information these tools can provide can be intuitive, useful, and remove complexity?  At the end of the day, technology has to deliver value by enhancing the way we experience the world around us.”

Below, read our interview with Raja Schaar:

What methodology did you use to inspire your students?
Raja Schaar (RS): Keep it fun. We were dealing with challenging content in a short amount of time; we compressed a 15-week semester into 5 weeks. Also, engineering students tend to be very serious and focused. I wanted to disrupt that by introducing a few games and improv activities. I also used traditional design thinking methodologies to spur creativity and relied on mood boards to keep students inspired and grounded.  

Where did your students find their inspiration to develop their ideas?
RS: It took over a week before teams settled on a defined a problem. We started with a mind mapping exercise using the categories established by the Wearables for Good design challenge. We also scoped media, TED talks, and the blogosphere for more informative stories on real-world problems and populations. Since wearable devices sync with big data, we also looked for issues that could use better data. Students worked on the development of personas based on health profiles, location, current events, environmental statistics, and looked for reports from NGOs and other groups working in the same field. They developed mood boards to visualize their research and stay on track. They looked at context, related and existing products, user-centered design, and style.

How did they respond to it?
RS: For the most part, students were enthusiastic and they loved learning something new. Only a few students had thought about wearables as a part of the design discipline, which has so much potential. Seven students had experience with circuits and a few knew about coding. The learning curve was enormous. It was definitely challenging, but whenever the students got their code to run, their sensors to measure, or successfully soldered a component to a microcontroller,  they were visibly elated. They were using SnapChat, Twitter, and Facebook to document their progress. I love it when students get a sense of accomplishment and pride in learning.

Students were also excited about working on a project in the social innovation space. Georgia Tech’s undergraduate Biomedical Engineering program attracts mostly women. Sixty percent of our entering students are women and that ratio was reflected in my  course.  As a result, the students were jazzed about focusing on women and children. We were able to have deep discussions on issues that impact women globally, from sexual/reproductive health to trafficking and abuse, and empowering women through education. Being able to have mature conversations with passionate teams was refreshing.

Why do you think universities are not focusing on healthcare wearables when it seems that there is a high demand of healthcare wearables in the market?
RS: That’s a tough question, but I think it has to do with flexibility of Higher Education. Engineering program curriculum requirements are full to overflowing with required courses. A class like wearables for healthcare is seen as a depth elective. While students are required to take courses in circuits, courses are more theoretical than project-based. Project-based design courses are time-consuming and expensive for the program and the students. So adding a course like this isn’t taken lightly.

In the Industrial Design program at Georgia Tech, there’s a course on wearables, a course on interactive products, and a separate course on healthcare design. Each course lives separately and has its own complexity. What’s really cool is when you combine  the three disciplines because you end up with an opportunity to take information from the body, read it through an interactive device, and use that data to empower patients and healthcare providers with information on how to prevent, manage, diagnose, and/or treat illness. When you have students who are knowledgeable on all three disciplines: 1) understand the body 2) have a basic handle on the design process 3) familiarity with sensors and microcontrollers and coding, and then combine that with a strong desire to improve health and well-being, you’re able to leverage their expanded skill-set to effectively apply knowledge.

What were the challenges?
RS: The program was based in Ireland which was a blessing and curse. Here we were doing a project focused on the developing world, but we had no direct interaction with people living in resource-constrained environments. We also had challenges of time and access to the university’s building.  Also, in the U.S., the expectation is to work around the clock. In Ireland, they close the campus at 10 pm.  Students worked as much as they could within a time frame.

Had there not been a Wearables for Good challenge, what would have been the next steps to develop these wearables?
RS: We have a few avenues I’ve been discussing with the students. CreateX is a GA Tech initiative to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Idea to Prototype is a course structured as a directed student where student get research credit to work on prototype development for their own project ideas. We also have 2 campus-wide competitions that BME projects have done well with: INVENTURE Prize at GA Tech and Ideas 2 Serve.

Do you partner with tech companies?
RS: No yet, but I’d love to! We have a few health care industry partners for our capstone course, but I’d like to work with some design and tech companies to help with the specific opportunities related to wearables. We just got a large donation from Texas Instruments to build an interdisciplinary makerspace on campus.

As some of you might know, UNICEF, ARM, and frog announced the Wearables for Good challenge winners last week at SLUSH, a tech event in Helsinki. The winners are SoaPen, a wearable soap that helps limit the spread of infectious viruses by encouraging hand washing for children and KhushiBaby, a necklace that stores electronic health data to track child immunization.

You can read more about the 10 finalists here: http://wearablesforgood.com/finalists/ 
You can read about the winners here: http://wearablesforgood.com/winners/

The original UNICEF article with Raja Schaar is linked HERE.

A ballet dancer’s grace is not just because the dancer constantly practices moving with poise. New research published in the Journal of Neurophysiology reports that professional ballet dancers’ years of physical training have enabled their nervous systems to coordinate their muscles when they move more precisely than individuals who have no dance training.

The nervous system is comprised of the brain, spinal cord and nerves throughout the body. It allows the body’s systems to communicate and coordinate with each other, such as the brain controlling movement of the leg muscles.

Rather than controlling muscles individually, the nervous system initiates movement by activating muscles in groups. The groups of muscles are called "motor modules," and the nervous system combines different motor modules to achieve a wide range of motion.

In this study, a research team at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology examined whether long-term training to enhance physical coordination, such as dance training, affects how motor modules are recruited when moving.

"This study helps us understand how long-term training in an activity such as dance affects how we do everyday tasks," says study author Lena Ting, Ph.D. "We found that years of ballet training change how the nervous system coordinates muscles for walking and balancing behaviors overall. This may also have implications for how training through rehabilitation helps people with impaired mobility." Ting is professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. 

The researchers compared the movements of professional ballet dancers with 10 or more years of ballet training to individuals with no dance or gymnastics training. Gait and activity of muscles in the legs and torso were tracked as the subjects walked across the floor, across a wide beam and across a challenging narrow beam.

Ballet dancers and untrained individuals had similar gait patterns when they walked across the floor or the beam. However, when walking across the narrow beam, ballet dancers showed better balance by walking across farther. Ballet dancers recruited more motor modules and did so more consistently than untrained individuals, indicating that ballet dancers used their muscles more effectively and efficiently, the researchers stated. The ballet dancers also used more of the same motor modules when walking across a floor as when walking across the beam compared with untrained individuals, supporting that training can affect control of every-day movements.

According to the researchers, the results show that years of ballet training changed how the nervous system coordinated muscles for walking and balancing behaviors.

The article "Long-term training modifies the modular structure and organization of walking balance control" is published ahead-of-print in Journal of Neurophysiology.

CONTACT:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

“The secret to our success is, it started as a grassroots effort – we liked each other and wanted to interact. It wasn’t imposed upon us by some academic structure,” Sheldon May told a packed Suddath Room and an overflow crowd in the Petit Institute atrium, Tuesday when the institute hosted a 20^th anniversary celebration. 

“There are so many other things on the Georgia Tech campus now that have to do with interactions among scientists and engineers, but I think we broke a lot of barriers,” May continued. “Sometimes there is a moment in time and you don’t realize what the implications of that moment are.”

Tuesday’s event drew 300 guests, including Petit Institute founding members, like May; Georgia Tech administrators, like President Bud Peterson and President Emeritus Wayne Clough, Executive Vice President of Research Steve Cross, as well as Deans Gary May (College of Engineering) and Paul Goldbart (College of Sciences); institute faculty members, staff, spouses and children, members of the institute’s Executive Advisory Board, and the man whose generosity has been the catalyst for growth and success, Parker H. “Pete” Petit.

They came to celebrate 20 years of interdisciplinary research, to recognize the founders, the leaders and teams, but also to eat and socialize, scientists and engineers like in the old days, but this time catered and with a live band. There were designated speakers: Petit Institute Executive Director Bob Guldberg, Peterson, Petit, founding director Bob Nerem, May and Loren Williams.

The gala was a fitting exclamation point for the Petit Institute on Tuesday, which began with the annual meeting of the advisory board in the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB).

By 4:30 p.m., as members of the board were finishing their tours of new labs in the EBB, guests started arriving at the Petit Institute, and soon after, the presentations began with opening statements from Guldberg, who started by pointing out some of the essential current numbers: 172 faculty members, 17 research centers, more than $58 million in research funding last year.

“We can go on and on about the numbers, but clearly more important than the numbers are the people that make up this collaborative community,” said Guldberg, who introduced Peterson.

The Georgia Tech president applauded the work of his predecessors, Pat Crecine and Clough, “who had so much to do with the creation and success of the Petit Institute.” He recognized Don Giddens, who led the initial task force that resulted in creation of the interdisciplinary bioresearch institute, and founding director Nerem.

The word “team” kept coming up throughout the evening, but if there was a star of the celebration, it was probably Nerem, who got a bighearted introduction from Petit.

“Unselfish leadership makes wonderful things happen,” said Petit, alluding to Nerem. “Bob Nerem’s unselfish leadership brought us to where we are and I don’t think any of us could have envisioned what has played out here.”

Nerem lavished praise on fellow Petit Institute founders and early faculty members, leaders and supporters, like Giddens, May, Guldberg, Jim Powers, Bud Suddath, Bill Todd, Ray Vito, Roger Wartell, Loren Williams and Ajit Yoganathan, most of whom were in the audience. 

“It does take a team,” Nerem said later in the evening. “Ultimately, people in leadership positions have to serve the goals of the organization, but also the people in the organization. The bottom line is, and you’ve heard me say this before, that just like life in general, research is a people business.”

Nerem also recognized the contributions of the presidents, the philanthropists, the foundations, and the unique, integral partnership with Emory University.

And then Nerem, a pioneering bioengineer, closed with a quote from a pioneering rocket scientist, which seemed like a fitting example of cross-disciplinary appreciation, and earned him the only standing ovation of the evening.

“I think, in a way, it tells the story of what we’re all about in this building,” he said, then quoted, “ ‘It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.’”

Petit Institute 20th Anniversary Video

Petit Institute History

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory had several faculty recognized during the week and at the award event in these categories:

The Emory 1% Award

  Hanjoong Jo

  Professor of biomedical engineering, associate chair for Emory/Georgia Tech BME

  The Emory 1% Award recognizes faculty principal investigators from any School who received study section scores (NIH grant application scoring system) in the top 1 percentile on a grant proposal.

The MilliPub Club Award

  May Wang

  Associate professor, biomedical engineering for Emory/Georgia Tech BME,

  Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scholar

  Qian Ximei

  Assistant professor, biomedical engineering, Emory School of Medicine

  Shuming Nie

  The Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering

  The MilliPub Club honors and recognizes current Emory faculty who have published one or more individual papers throughout their careers that have each garnered more than 1000 citations. Such a paper is commonly considered a “citation classic” and represents high impact scholarship.  The MilliPub Club is sponsored by the School of Medicine, but membership is open to any qualifying Emory faculty member.

Hidden Gems Award

  Michael Davis

  Associate professor, biomedical engineering for Emory/Georgia Tech BME

  Gari Clifford

  Associate professor, biomedical engineering for Emory/Georgia Tech BME

  Hidden Gem award recipients were nominated by their departments in recognition of their outstanding, but often unnoticed or unrecognized, contributions to Emory and beyond.

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

The first place team developed a mobile app called Divy, which allows groups to seamlessly track their expenses and issue reimbursements. Divy removes all the frustrations of financially settling up after a weekend trip or class project. Team members Garrett Wallace, John Riley, and Ryan Brooks were awarded a cash prize of $7,000 along with a potential $100,000 investment from the Seraph Group.

Wallace, a biomedical engineering (BME) major, said his team signed up for the competition because they thought it would be a fun way to spend the weekend. But, as the weekend went on, he said they realized what they were developing had great potential.

“People were getting really excited about our idea,” Wallace said. “When we were chosen for the final round of pitching and later were awarded first place, it was an awesome feeling. At an event like this, you are immediately rewarded for your hard work. BME definitely prepared me well for the positive team dynamic that was an essential component to our team’s success.”

The winners of second place developed an app called Navlit, a Web application that matches a city visitor with a local resident who shares similar backgrounds and interests. Navlit’s aim is to leverage this interest-based matching algorithm to provide users with a personalized traveling experience and locals with an opportunity to showcase their city. Team members Sunny Patel, Ratchapong Tangkijvorakul, David Wang, Henry Wang, and Saeed Siddiqi were awarded $5,000 in cash. The team also won the Microsoft “Best Hack” award along with Microsoft Surface Pro 4s.

Patel, a computer engineering major, said the Navlit team plans to turn their idea into a real-world business that will have a positive impact on the tourism industry.

But even the best collaborations require nurturing if they are to blossom into world-changing discoveries. That’s where the ImmunoEngineering Seed Grant program comes in.

“These seed grants allow us to pilot new ideas, gather data and be more competitive for large federal grants,” says Krish Roy, director of the ImmunoEngineering Research Center at Georgia Tech. “It also builds new bridges – collaborations across Georgia Tech and Emory, by providing ways to work together and generate new ideas, gather new data.”

Five new “bridges” – teams of Georgia Tech/Emory researchers – have just received important foundational support through the seed grant program for 2015-2016. These research proposals, each receiving a $50,000 award, are:

• “DNA-barcoded peptide-MHC tetramers for profiling antigen-specific T cells.” Researchers: Gabe Kwong (Georgia Tech), John Altman (Emory).

• “Modulation of early inflammatory response to prevent muscle degeneration in massive rotator cuff tears.” Researchers: Claudius Jarrett (Emory), Johnna Temenoff (Georgia Tech).

 • “Development of novel immune enhancing microparticle-conjugated RIG-I agonist.” Researchers: Mehul Suthar (Emory), Krish Roy (Georgia Tech).

• “Engineered mesenchymal stromal cells for enhancing lymphangiogenesis as a therapeutic for osteoarthritis.” Researchers: Nick Willet (Emory/Georgia Tech), J. Brandon Dixon (Georgia Tech), Rebecca Levit (Emory).

• Human mesenchymal stem cell-driven immunomodulation for enhanced engraftment of human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes.” Researchers: Young-Sup Yoon (Emory), Satish Kumar (Georgia Tech).

“We congratulate this year’s class of ImmunoEngineering Seed Grant recipients,” says C. Michael Cassidy, president and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), the lead granting agency for the program. “The collaborative work of Georgia Tech and Emory researchers is developing innovative approaches for groundbreaking research.”

The Georgia ImmunoEngineering Consortium brings together engineers, chemists, physicists, computational scientists, immunologists and clinicians to collaboratively explore the inner workings of the immune system in a quest for breakthrough solutions to improve the lives of people suffering from cancer, infectious diseases, autoimmune and inflammatory disorders (such as diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, fibrosis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, etc.), as well as those individuals undergoing regenerative therapies (think of transplantation, spinal cord injury, bone and cartilage repair, etc.).

“In addition to fundamental immunology studies, the program also supports studies aimed at improving our ability to predict, measure and manipulate the intensity, quality and durability of the immune response,” notes Ignacio Sanz, a GRA Eminent Scholar and director of the Lowance Center for Human Immunology at Emory, where he also serves as chief of the Division of Rheumatology.

While GRA provides most of the funding for the seed grant program additional funding is provided by Emory and Georgia Tech. Roy likens the program to an early stage venture investment.

“If you find ten really good ideas that are already pre-screened and peer-reviewed, the chances are, when those apply for large federal grants the success rates will be high,” says Roy, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department of Emory and Georgia Tech. “Even if only two or three of those 10 gets funded and becomes successful, that represents a manifold return on investment.”

In other words, the ImmunoEngineering Seed Grant program and the winning proposals are a research community example of smart money aimed at a good bet.

CONTACTS:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

The CRISPR-Cas9 system genome editing platform has been used by labs across the world to specifically make changes to DNA. Wild type, active Cas9 protein is targeted to the correct DNA via a guide RNA sequence and then cuts the DNA target. Until recently, Cas9 catalytic activity has been controlled by mutating the protein so that it cannot cut DNA. These ‘deadCas9’ proteins bind DNA without cutting it, and have been fused to other proteins in order to fluorescently tag DNA or turn on gene expression.

A tool to selectively knock out and activate genes in the same cell (termed ‘orthogonal gene editing’) would provide a powerful method to manipulate biological processes, since most cellular functions are driven by combinations of genes. Inspired by the need for a simple orthogonal gene editing system, the MIT and Georgia Tech team designed a ‘deadRNA’ that functionally bound DNA without cutting it. deadRNAs were made by reducing the guide RNA target length to 14 or 15 bp, and by adding two MS2 binding loops into the sgRNA backbone. After systematically studying how the structure of deadRNAs influences gene activation and DNA cutting, and characterizing off-target gene activation, the authors knocked out and upregulated different genes in cells using a single active Cas9 protein.

The authors hope this technology will be useful for the field. ‘deadRNAs allow us to integrate two powerful functionalities of Cas9 – knocking out genes and activating them – in the same cell. This will be very useful for studying the interaction of different genes’, said Konermann, senior author of this study. Dahlman, the first author, agreed, noting that ‘deadRNAs may be useful for in vivo gene editing, since some mouse models already express active Cas9. My lab is excited to use deadRNAs to understand how complex gene interactions affect disease in cells and in animals’. The authors also highlighted that their work reveals an important concept. Previously, it was thought that active Cas9 could only be used to cut DNA. This work, as well as a similar study recently published by George Church’s laboratory at Harvard, demonstrate that guide RNAs can be designed to ‘functionally bind’ DNA without cutting it. Abudayyeh emphasized this point, noting that ‘our work and the exciting work from the Church lab, shows that the RNA encodes the functionality and can tell the protein whether to cut or not’. This points to a more fundamental mechanism, whereby the interactions between the protein, sgRNA, and DNA dictate whether the protein cuts the target DNA.

References

Dahlman JE, Abudayyeh OA, Joung J, Gootenberg JS, Zhang F, Konermann S. Orthogonal gene knock out and activation with a catalytically active Cas9 nuclease. Nature Biotechnology, 2015.

Kiani S, Chavez A, Tuttle M, Hall RN, Chari R, Beal J, Vora S, Buchthal J, Ebrahimkhani MR, Collins JJ, Weiss R, Church G. Cas9 gRNA engineering for genome editing, activation, and repression. Nature Methods, 2015.

James Dahlman, http://www.dahlmanlab.org/, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is a chemical and bioengineer whose work lies at the interface of nanotechnology, genomics, and gene editing. He studied in vivo gene editing at the Broad Institute; he received his Ph.D. from MIT and Harvard Medical School. There he designed nanoparticles that efficiently deliver RNAs to the lung and heart. These nanoparticles have been used by over ten labs across the United States to study disease. The Dahlman Lab is interested in drug delivery, targeted in vivo gene editing, and using genomics to understand and improve biomaterial design. 

Silvana Konermann is a neuroscientist and bioengineer focused on developing better tools for the functional study of genetic disease. Silvana studied biology at ETH Zurich and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science working in the lab of Feng Zhang. Her work has been focused on developing better technologies to study gene function, including tools for optical transcriptional and epigenetic perturbation as well as genome-scale transcriptional control using CRISPR/Cas9. She is interested in applying these tools to the high-throughput study of neurodegeneration. She has won the Harold M. Weintraub Award for her work.

CONTACT:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Garrett Stanley and Christine Payne, both faculty members of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, are among the 131 investigators working at 125 institutions in the U.S. and eight other countries receiving 67 new awards, totaling more than $38 million.  The new round of funding brings the NIH investment for BRAIN Initiative research to $85 million in fiscal year 2015.

Stanley, Payne, and their collaborators are part of a new round of projects for visualizing the brain in action. It’s all part of the initiative launched by President Obama in 2014 as a wide-spread effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights for treating a range of brain disorders, like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy and traumatic brain injury.

Stanley and Dieter Jaeger, professor in Emory University’s Department of Biology, are principal investigators of a project titled, “Multiscale Analysis of Sensory-Motor Cortical Gating in Behaving Mice.”

Their overall goal is better understand and capture the flow of information as we sense and perceive the outside world, “so that we can take action,” says Stanley, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), a joint department of Emory and Georgia Tech.  

The Stanley lab provides expertise on tactile sensing and information processing, while the Jaeger lab provides expertise on motor/muscle coordination and control.

“We are developing approaches to using genetically expressed voltage sensors to optically image brain activity during a sensory-motor task,” Stanley says.

The new technology would let the researchers monitor brain activity at high spatial and temporal resolution over long periods of time.

“It allows us to address questions related to the circuits involved in coordinating the relationship between sensing and action for the first time,” Stanley says. 

The project grew out of another collaboration between Jaeger and Stanley. They are co-principal investigators of an NIH-sponsored training grant in computational neuroscience, which targets a new generation of scientists bound together through questions about how the brain computes.

“Through this interaction, Dieter and I got to know each other better, started to talk more science, and eventually cooked up this project,” Stanley says.  “The research is relevant to public health because it provides an impactful and innovative study of the circuitry underlying the output from the basal ganglia to the motor cortex and the integration of basal ganglia output with sensory information.”

Debilitating and difficult to treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and dystonia are caused by dysfunction of this circuitry.

“The proposed research is expected to provide basic insights into motor circuit function and may reveal new possibilities for treatment of these diseases as well as a better understanding of deep brain stimulation treatments already in use,” says Stanley, who was part of the first round of BRAIN Initiative funding last year with fellow Georgia Tech researcher Craig Forest.

Peter Borden, a Ph.D. student in Stanley’s lab, and Christian Waiblinger, a postdoctoral researcher in Stanley’s lab, will also be contributing to the research.

Meanwhile, Payne is principal investigator for a project titled, “Conducting polymer nanowires for neural modulation.” She’s collaborating with Bret Flanders, a professor at Kansas State whose lab is working on new ways to insulate nanowires. Georgia Tech students Scott Thourson (a Bioengineering Ph.D. candidate) and Rohan Kadambi (undergrad in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) are helping to lead the effort.

“Understanding how the brain functions requires fundamentally new tools to probe individual neurons without damaging the surrounding tissue,” says Payne, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

“This research will develop a prototype device that uses biocompatible conducting polymer nanowires to interface with individual neurons,” says Payne. “The use of flexible conducting polymers in place of traditional metal, silicon, and carbon electrodes is expected to minimize disruption to the surrounding tissue.”    

Last year NIH awarded $46 million to the effort, designed to ultimately catalyze new treatments and cures for devastating brain disorders and diseases that are estimated by the World Health Organization to affect more than one billion people on the planet.

“Georgia Tech is proud to play a role in this important global effort,” says Steve Cross, executive vice president for research. “These grants are further evidence of Tech’s reputation for conducting world-class bioengineering and bioscience research.”

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

With the support of a five-year, $2.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation National Research Traineeship program, this faculty team will create new bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs and concentrations in healthcare robotics – the first degree programs in this area in the United States.

Led by Ayanna M. Howard, the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), this initiative will blend Emory’s medical and clinical expertise and Tech’s robotics and engineering know-how to train engineering students in robotics, physiology, neuroscience, rehabilitation, and psychology. The program also aims to increase the appeal of STEM fields to a wide range of people, including women, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities.

The U.S. population is living longer and is becoming older and more racially and ethnically diverse. In addition, the number of younger people living with a lifelong disability is also increasing, including 52,351 post-9/11 military veterans with combat injuries and 6.4 million children with developmental disorders or delays. Fifty million people are also diagnosed annually with neurological/neurodegenerative diseases. “Providing innovative solutions to help improve an individual’s quality of life continues to emerge as a growing need,” said Howard, who leads the Human-Automation Systems Lab in ECE. “Keeping this need in mind, we will train engineers not only to develop robotics technologies, but also learn how to work with and listen to the needs of the technology end users – patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.”

Three faculty join Howard’s leadership team. Charlie Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University and director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab in BME, focuses on intelligent mobile robots for physical assistance in the context of healthcare. Lena H. Ting, a BME professor with an appointment in Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Division of Physical Therapy, and co-director of the Neural Engineering Center, will integrate human needs related to accessibility and rehabilitation to inform the design of robotics solutions.

Randy D. Trumbower, an assistant professor in both BME and Physical Therapy and the director of research within Rehabilitation Medicine at Emory, will work on interfacing robotics and physical therapy techniques.

Additional faculty will serve as student advisors, including Wendy Rogers, professor in Tech’s School of Psychology; Jun Ueda, an associate professor from Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Steven L. Wolf, a professor in Emory’s Division of Physical Therapy; and Minoru Shinohara, an associate professor in Tech’s School of Applied Physiology.

The team will focus first on developing the doctoral and master’s programs, with the goal of having a mini-cohort of Ph.D. students in spring 2016 and starting the official graduate degree programs next fall. The undergraduate degree will combine the five-year, B.S./M.S. degree program and undergraduate thesis option, allowing students to build a foundation for an eventual M.S. thesis. The graduate program will build on the highly successful multidisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech. “We’re excited about this opportunity to further enhance and grow our world-class educational programs in robotics,” said Kemp, who has served on the robotics Ph.D. program’s leadership team since its inception in 2007.

A sampling of these courses include:

•        Interfacing Engineering and Rehabilitation, taught by Trumbower, engages both engineering and clinical students. They will learn equally from clinical experts about their target demographics and the issues they face and from engineering faculty about how robotics can address these challenges. Members from collaborating medical organizations and non-profit agencies will regularly visit the class to talk with students. Discussion points and group projects will be derived from real case studies using persons with physical challenges as technology consumers and consultants.

“In order for clinicians to play a more active role in the development, evaluation, and implementation of robotics technologies in rehabilitation, they must first more comfortably engage engineers who develop and test these technologies,” said Trumbower. “Mutually, in order for engineers to play a more active role in the development, evaluation, and implementation of rehabilitation technologies, they must first more comfortably engage clinicians who evaluate and treat patients. This course provides a novel learning approach for this type of collaborative interaction.”

•        A course on ethics, privacy, and regulations in medicine and biomedical robotics will be offered, where students learn about considerations that must be addressed when designing and deploying robotic systems for health. “While engineering students at Tech are required to take ethics courses, certain areas like privacy or statistical analysis have different nuances in the healthcare arena,” said Howard. “For instance, what does ‘good’ mean as a healthcare roboticist vs. a traditional roboticist? How do you manage privacy and share information from doctor to doctor, and is there a correlation to a robot in the doctor’s office doing the same thing with a robot in a patient’s home?”

•        Interdisciplinary research training will provide students with hands-on, healthcare experience during their first summer in the program. Matched with mentors in both engineering and healthcare, students will do one week of clinical rotations, where they will observe medical practices and learn about current problems in healthcare.

Students will then conduct eight weeks of research using robotics to address healthcare issues discovered during rotations. Clinical partners with which students may work include Emory Medical School, Shepherd Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory ALS Center, Atlanta Area Agency on Aging, and the Veterans Administration.

Additional components of the healthcare robotics degree programs are required communications training and availability of entrepreneurship activities for interested students. All students will receive communications training, so that they can interact effectively with different audiences. Examples include academic and professional communications; talking to patients or patient groups about their work; giving media interviews, writing press releases, and producing short videos about their work; and communicating with the general public. Trainees interested in entrepreneurship will be able to participate in a Georgia Tech student incubator during their second summer in the program, or they may intern at a medical startup company in the Atlanta area.

Working with engineering students to think about and design their technologies for the benefit of their target populations will be an exciting challenge, according to Howard. “Working in healthcare robotics will be a learning process, where there is no equation in the book that can be derived. It will require looking at a problem, working and talking with others, and developing a solution by being creative and thinking outside of the box,” said Howard. “This will be a different way of thinking for engineers, and when our students graduate, they will be exceptional because of that.” 

Sources for statistics: National Center for Education Statistics, Congressional Research Service/U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

But groundbreaking work by Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Gabe Kwong may improve the odds significantly. 

In a recently published research paper for PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States), Kwong and his colleagues explain their development of activity-based biomarkers for early cancer detection along with a mathematical framework to predict their use in humans.

Unlike traditional biomarkers, activity-based biomarkers rely on the catalytic activity of enzymes to amplify cancer-derived signals, which allows detection of small, earlier-stage tumors. Using a class of synthetic, activity-based biomarkers, the team has comprehensively explored how detection sensitivities depend on probe design, enzymatic activity and organ physiology, and how they may be fine-tuned to reveal the presence of small tumors in humans.

“We’ve designed a system which is composed of nanoparticles, and these nanoparticles do a very interesting job inside the body once we infuse them – they find the tumor cells and then amplify a signal,” says Kwong, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a faculty member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. 

“This amplified signal is not detected locally but actually ends up filtering in the urine,” says Kwong, lead author of the paper. “So when we inject trillions of nanoparticles, each of them is amplifying this tumor signal. Furthermore, because urine is concentrated and purified from blood, we have two modes of enriching the signal. One is through this amplification at the tumor site and the other is this enrichment in the urine.”

A challenge of using blood tests for early cancer detection is that it’s kind of like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Tumors shed unique biomarkers (proteins, for example). Adult humans have on average five liters of blood. So there are tiny, early stage tumors (typically five millimeters to one centimeter in size) shedding biomarkers into a large pool of blood.

“And they don’t circulate in the blood forever. There’s a drainage system,” Kwong says. “Imagine trying to fill a bathtub with water without first plugging the drain. It’s a race, where these tumors are making these biomarkers, these biomolecules, in the blood, but the body is getting rid of them faster.”

But using the system Kwong and his team have devised, in test samples the researchers have been able to detect tumors as small as five millimeters in diameter, a size threshold that is difficult for medical imaging to achieve.  

The research is part of a collective body of work that Kwong, who came to Georgia Tech last year, started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). His co-authors of the paper (entitled “Mathematical framework for activity-based cancer biomarkers”), all affiliated with M.I.T., are Jaideep Dudani, Emmanuel Corrodeguas, Eric Mazumdar, Seyedeh Zekavat and Sangeeta Bhatia.

“It hasn’t been tested in humans yet, but this ability to amplify signals using nanoparticles is very promising,” says Kwong, who figures the system could be ready for clinical tests in humans in another three to four years. 

Ultimately, the goal is to perform a more specific kind of test, “that will allow us to differentiate flavors of cancer as well as their stage. That’s where we are headed”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Pulmonary fibrosis is an incurable disease in which the uncontrolled growth of scar tissue severely damages the ability of the lungs to bring oxygen into the body. Researchers plan to hijack the cellular mechanisms that normally worsen the disease, causing them to instead produce a chemical compound that would reduce the cross-linking associated with the fibrosis.

The award is one of 13 Transformative Research Awards announced by the NIH on October 6. Each year, the exclusive NIH initiative funds a small number of “high-risk, high-reward” research proposals designed to advance innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research.

“Fibrosis is wound healing that just won’t quit,” explained Barker. “Cells continually repair the same tissue over and over again until you get this dense, biophysically restricted scar tissue. That scar tissue not only impairs the ability to bring in oxygen, but at the cellular level that increased stiffness also provides a dominant signal that continues to drive this aberrant process.“

Barker, whose lab studies how cells respond biochemically and biophysically to the microenvironment around them, wants to tap into the signaling that occurs between the cells and their environment to co-opt the cellular response to stiffness of the extracellular matrix. Instead of creating more scar, the cells would instead respond by releasing a protease to dissolve some of the crosslinks that create the stiffness.

“In the disease process, as more extracellular matrix is deposited and more cross links are created, the stiffness of the tissue increases,” Barker explained. “If we can have that stiffness inherently drive the production of proteases, which are enzymes that break down the extracellular matrix, then there’s the potential to create a feedback loop in which these enzymes would come in and cleave the unwanted matrix proteins. That would relieve some of the crosslinks and begin to soften the tissue.”

The researchers plan to use conventional gene therapy techniques to insert a mechanism into the cells that would activate only when the fibrotic process was occurring. When not needed, the mechanism would lie dormant, allowing it to be distributed broadly among both normal and abnormal lung cells. “It would be a self-limiting therapy that’s controlled locally at the cellular level,” Barker said.

While treatment is the ultimate goal, Barker also wants to develop a signaling mechanism that could be used to track progress of the disease. A small number of sentinel cells affected by the stiffening extracellular matrix would express a fluorescent protein, allowing clinicians to see where conditions are changing. Currently, there is no way to measure changing stiffness in the lungs of living organisms.

Barker doesn’t expect to attain all of the project goals within the grant period, but he does hope to build a foundation for research, which could have applications to other diseases such as cancer that also have biomechanical signaling components.

“The idea that we can target the biomechanics of a tissue as a tractable target for gene therapy has not been explored,” Barker said. “It is ripe for exploration at this time because the last decade or so has seen a flurry of research into how biomechanics drives disease and different cellular processes. Scientists have made some significant strides in understanding the mechanisms of how cells sense mechanics, how those things go awry, and how the environment can drive some significant biology.”

The proposal was developed in collaboration with MD/PhD student Dwight Chambers. Barker also plans to work with Associate Professors Melissa Kemp and Phil Santangelo from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and with a research team at the University of Michigan.

Under the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program supported by the NIH Common Fund, awards support exceptional investigators pursuing bold research projects that span the broad mission of the NIH, including developing methods for cells to synthesize their own drugs, using cell phones to identify and track disease-carrying mosquitoes in their natural habitats, stopping depression by monitoring and altering brain cell states, and exploring how socially learned behavior can be passed on biologically to future generations.

“This program has consistently produced research that revolutionized scientific fields by giving investigators the freedom to take risks and explore potentially groundbreaking concepts,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “We look forward to the remarkable advances in biomedical research the 2015 awardees will make.”

The NIH Common Fund encourages collaboration and supports a series of exceptionally high-impact, trans-NIH programs. Common Fund programs are designed to pursue major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single NIH Institute could tackle alone, but that the agency as a whole can address to make the biggest impact possible on the progress of medical research. Barker’s award will also be supported through the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

The Transformative Research Award, established in 2009, promotes cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approaches and is open to individuals and teams of investigators who propose research that could potentially create or challenge existing paradigms.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986)

Writer: John Toon

Thanks to diagnostic tests, clinicians and patients can already know the type of breast cancer they’re up against, but one big question remains: How likely is it that the cancer will invade other parts of the body? Answering that question could help guide the choice of treatment options, from aggressive and difficult therapies to more conservative ones.

By studying chemical signals from specific cells that are involved in helping cancer invade other tissues in each woman’s body, researchers have developed a predictive model that could provide an invasiveness index for each patient.

“We want women to have more information to make a personal decision beyond the averages calculated for an entire population,” said Manu Platt, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We are using our systems biology tools and predictive medicine approaches to look at potential markers we could use to help us understand the risk each woman has. This would provide information for a more educated discussion of treatment options.”

The research, sponsored with funds from the Georgia Research Alliance and the Giglio family donation to the Department of Biomedical Engineering, was reported September 9 in the journal Scientific Reports. Beyond breast cancer, the technique could offer similar decision-making assistance for men with prostate cancer, where treatment also requires making difficult choices about the risk of metastasis.

Platt’s research team is examining chemical signals produced by the macrophages that can help aggressive tumors invade new tissues. Macrophages normally clean up foreign particles and harmful microorganisms in the body, but aggressive tumors can enlist macrophages in helping them metastasize. Tumor associated macrophages contribute significantly to tumor invasion, with cysteine cathepsin proteases – enzymes that break down proteins in the body – important contributors.

To develop their predictive index, Platt’s research team used variability in macrophage expression of four types of cathepsin, the cathepsin inhibitor cystatin C, and kinase activation levels. The model, which has been under development for two years, was produced by studying macrophages from a population of women who didn’t have breast cancer. Platt and colleagues Keon-Young Park and Gande Li co-cultured a standard breast cancer cell line (MCF-7) with macrophages produced from monocytes donated by these cancer-free women.

Next, they measured the level of invasiveness facilitated by macrophages from each individual donor, exposing the cancer cells and macrophages to a collagen gel designed to simulate breast tissue and measuring how many cells invaded it. While the breast is composed of many other tissues, collagen makes up the largest proportion and provided a good measure of how aggressively the cells would invade, Platt said.

Platt’s team correlated the level of invasion through the gel to the chemical signals being expressed by the macrophages. The researchers were surprised at the large amount of patient-to-patient variability in macrophage activity – variability that could account for the outcome differences in the patients receiving similar cancer treatments. The signaling levels and related invasion measurements were used to train a computational model developed by Platt’s team.

The researchers next obtained blood samples containing monocytes from nine patients being treated for breast cancer at DeKalb Medical Center, a major Atlanta-area hospital. They measured signals from these macrophages and used their model – which had been trained on macrophage signaling and resulting invasiveness – to predict which of the cancer patients would be expected to have more invasive types of cancer. They compared their predications to what the clinician – Dr. John Kennedy – provided as their initial diagnosis.

“Based on the cells we got from the clinic, the ones that had been predicted to have the greatest potential for invasion were the ones that had produced the most invasive form of breast cancer in the patients,” Platt said.

While the study could not account for possible differences in the length of time the cancers had been growing, they did correlate well with observations. In future research, Platt hopes to follow the women for five years to determine if the model’s predictions are related to cancer recurrence. He also plans to expand the model with additional macrophage data, and test it against additional blood samples.

“The more information you give the model, the closer you get to the prediction,” he said. “We think this is a very big start.”

The strength of this technique, Platt believes, is that it measures what’s happening at the level where cancer is metastasizing.

“We are measuring at the level of activity of these intracellular enzymes and the ultimate activity of the proteases they produce that are not only the biomarkers of the tumor, but also help the tumor grow,” he said. “Everything about us is different. Our genetics are different and our lifestyles are different, so clinicians have to make decisions in all that variability. All of those differences can be measured and captured in this output.”

Platt believes the technique could one day lead to a simple blood test that would provide information useful in making therapy recommendations. The test might also help determine which women should be monitored more closely to detect the beginnings of a cancer.

“Together, this establishes proof-of-principle that personalized information acquired from minimally invasive blood draws may provide useful information to inform oncologists and patients of invasive/metastatic risk, helping to make decisions regard radical mastectomy or milder, conservative treatments to save patients from hardship and surgical recovery,” he wrote in the paper.

CITATION: Keon-Young Park, Gande Li and Manu O. Platt, "Monocyte-derived macrophage assisted breasat cancer cell invasion as a personalized, predictive metric to score metastatic risk," (Scientific Reports 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep13855

Research News

Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986).
Writer: John Toon

Weiss, a recent graduate of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering is one half of an entrepreneurial team that created “replantable” (with a lower-case ‘r’) – a company that emerged from under the broad CREATE-X umbrella at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Together with Ruwan Subasinghe, a recent mechanical engineering graduate, Weiss took part in Startup Summer, a 12-week accelerator program (part of the CREATE-X suite of entrepreneurial training programs) for Georgia Tech students and recent graduates who want to launch startup companies. These companies are based on the students’ own inventions and prototypes, and the program teaches participants to understand potential customers and the market so they can address real needs.

The “nanoFarm” (the lower case ‘n’ also is by choice) actually is replantable’s latest incarnation after the team pursued a winding road of ideas, all based around a similar theme.

“Everything we’ve done has been about trying to get the freshest food to the consumer,” says Weiss, who met Subasinghe during their freshman year. This past February, Subasinghe contacted Weiss and asked if he wanted to do a start-up together.

“He’d gotten into hydroponics and was growing strawberries, and I had a backyard garden in Philadelphia, where I’m from. So we both come from a background of growing stuff,” says Weiss, who was a member of Petit Institute faculty member Wilbur Lam's lab. “The first thing we talked about was live shipping, which would fundamentally change the food production industry.”

It involved the shipping of plants in hydroponic containers, preventing spoilage without the costly energy expense of refrigeration, reducing food waste as well as methane and carbon dioxide emissions. The concept, ‘Living Local,’ earned the team $2,500 with a runner-up finish in the Ideas to Serve competition, March 27 at the Scheller College of Business. 

There was one significant challenge, though.

“We met with farmers and it would have been cost prohibitive for them,” Weiss says. “It didn’t make sense for them.”

Next they tried to remove the need for transportation altogether by growing produce on the roofs of grocery stores. They got a quick buy-in from Sevananda Market for their roof planting pallets. Weiss and Subasinghe got to be friends with the produce manager who told them, “I’ll take 40,” according to Weiss.

But then they started talking to professors in civil engineering and discovered that putting stuff on the roof was a big liability hurdle, and not within their realm of capability. What followed was a week or two of soul searching.

“We wondered what we were going to do,” Weiss says. “It was hell. But every startup I talked to has had this kind of week. It’s like, you know you’re going to get through it, but you don’t see any light until the light just hits you.”

Ultimately, it was a light-emitting diode, or LED, that hit them. They’d been focused on getting fresh food to consumers, and they finally asked themselves, Weiss says,  “why not let the consumer grow it? We were working our way down the chain.”

Their first nanoFarm container concept was six feet tall, a couple of feet wide, utilizing hydroponics and LED lighting. The current model of the nanoFarm cube is 18 inches tall, about 12 inches wide and deep, and really easy to use. In other words, you don’t need a green thumb. 

“We talked to more than 100 people who love fresh food, and their favorite part of growing was choosing what they wanted to grow, planting it, then harvesting it. In other words, not watering and weeding,” says Weiss, whose product requires the user to two basic things after sliding a sheet of seeds into the cube: fill it with water and close the door. Oh, then you’ve got to pick it before you eat it.

Weiss shows pictures of the produce he and Subasinghe have grown, indoors, out of the sunlight. Vivid greens and reds leap out of his smartphone, making the viewer hungry. The average apartment kitchen can easily accommodate several cubes.

Having graduated, Weiss and Subasinghe are now operating as the braintrust of replantable. They are engaged now in a beta test of their product and will soon launch a Kickstarter campaign. They want to be a success story on the path toward a sustainable and delicious lifestyle.

 For more information, visit the replantable website here.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Welcome to FOCUS (for Facilitated Open Collaborative Undergraduate Study), a new tutoring program introduced this semester. 

“It’s all part of the BME Learning Commons movement, as we like to call it,” says Joe Le Doux, associate chair of undergraduate learning and experience in the Coulter Department. “We have a large student body, and we want our students to help each other out. “

FOCUS is an accurate acronym, because the point of the program is to focus on specific academic subject areas each night, according to the BME undergraduate students who comprise the inaugural tutoring team, and who are filling an important gap.

“When you get deeper into your concentrated major specific courses, it’s harder to find tutors,” explains Nima Mikail, a third-year student. “So it’s nice to have a group of like-minded individuals who already took some of these classes that can help students who might be struggling.”

So, Sunday through Thursday, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. (“Prime study hours,” says Le Doux), students can just drop in to the BME Learning Commons and ask for help from the tutor working that night.

Mikail and his fellow FOCUS tutors are like a team of academic super friends, each with a specific super academic power, or focus area. 

Mikail teaches biostatistics and human physiology. Gloria Bowen teaches human physiology and conservation principles. Ana Gomez specializes in systems physiology and conservation principles. Daniel McNavish primary areas are biostatistics, biomechanics and cell physiology. Jimmy Zhou focuses on biostatistics, biosystems modeling and cell physiology.

But they aren’t constrained by those courses, and sometimes the student tutors are facilitating as much as tutoring.

“I can easily take a step back and just guide the group,” says Zhou. “Sometimes, the students end up just figuring out the problems by working together without any of my input.”

It’s the collaborative, drop-in approach to the FOCUS tutoring program that sets it apart from something like, say, the 1-to-1 Tutoring program offered through Georgia Tech’s Center for Academic Success. That program requires a student to make an appointment with a tutor. The FOCUS tutors have worked in that program, too, and recognize the distinct strengths of both. But they’re intentionally trying to do something different with FOCUS.

“I like the group dynamic of FOCUS,” says Bowen. “Students are actually encouraged to work together to figure things out, versus us just telling them what to do. One on one can be a little intimidating sometimes – it’s just you alone with a tutor. FOCUS is a great way to collaborate with other people.” 

The FOCUS tutors see the experience as a win-win, a kind of enlightened self-interest. Bowen, for example, has an interest in teaching, so she sees this as a way to help prepare for that. 

“There are selfish reasons for doing this,” Mikail quips. “Tutoring is the best way to study something yourself, and that’s something I try to impart to the students I tutor. It’s all about giving them tools for learning. The idea is that I work myself out of a job.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience 

Last spring, Close mentored four biomedical engineering (BME) students as they developed a mechanized stuffed animal to comfort sick children 12 months and younger. The Georgia Tech team was comprised of Kelsey Roberts, Matthew Lee, Laura Nelson and Joseph Boltri. The students equipped a "Cuddle Care" prototype — a stuffed monkey with arms long enough to bolster or wrap around a child — that breathes, thumps with a heartbeat, and emits radiant heat.

Close has carried the Cuddle Care idea with her since nursing school, when she cared for a 3-year-old boy with AIDS on an oncology unit. Tumors covered his small body, and his only relief came when Close and others held him. The child’s mother, who was HIV-positive and had several young children, rarely came to visit. Close agonized over the young boy’s future when her clinical rotation on the unit ended.

"I thought there must be a way to comfort a child who was suffering this way," she says. "I reflected back on what was providing him comfort. As I held him in a rocking chair, I was taking pressure off of his tumors. We were also exchanging heat. I could feel his heat up against my chest, and he was feeling the comfort of my heartbeat and being held and squeezed. He was made to feel safe in the arms of what should have been a parent but was not possible for this little boy."

She thought of developing a device mimicking those sensations that would wrap around a child to provide warmth and comfort. She applied for a provisional patent but put the device on hold for several years until she came to Emory, where the idea resurfaced. Close consulted the university’s Office of Technology Transfer, which connected her with Georgia Tech. Students there embraced her idea and made it their capstone project.

"We wanted to provide comfort to those who need it most," says BME student Matt Kee, who sees great potential for the "Cuddle Care" device in the pediatric health care market. Now under way are a patent application and development of a prototype for testing in the clinical setting.

Their device is a wearable wristband with NFC communication technology that stores emergency medical information for individual patients. Medical professionals can access this information, load updated records onto the device, and set alerts to facilitate the patient's care such as alerting them when to take medication. The band is worn by the patient on the wrist (or ankle), and the app is used by the medical professional.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is a United Nations program headquartered in New York City that provides long-term humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries. UNICEF’s Wearables for Good contest challenges innovators  to design wearable and sensor technology that serves people in resource constrained environments. The Wearables for Good challenge is open to anybody with ideas, including students, entrepreneurs, members of the maker community, engineers, designers, and technologists.

The catalyst for the team’s project arose from an experience broadening summer program which is a collaboration between the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and the National University of Ireland, Galway. The program is designed for third and fourth year BME students who are interested in an international experience which enables them to combine classroom learning with field trips to medical device companies to learn first-hand about their research, development, and manufacturing practices. Students complete roughly four courses from May 25 to July 31.

One of the unique courses offered is Wearables for Healthcare (BMED 4823) taught by Raja Schaar. Schaar, a design instructor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, said, “Wearables are the next hot thing in healthcare. Fitness trackers and smart watches have taken off in the market. With the advances in hardware, miniaturization, and the emergence of the Internet of Things, technology is catching up to our aspirations.” 

Technology is at a point where real-time health information is empowering consumers to be stewards of their own health as well as providing health care providers and researchers much needed insight into the lives of their patients. Useful wearables are now possible because companies are able to combine miniaturized sensors and cheap reliable power with advanced connectivity and big data analytics. 

In computing and design programs there has been a big push to marry digital and physical devices, but Schaar did not find a course focused on healthcare wearables out there. Schaar added, “Healthcare presents unique challenges related to regulatory compliance, privacy, and security. This is a fast-moving field, and as opportunities in bioinformatics, telehealth, and device development present themselves, our students need to be positioned to compete and contribute.”

During the first week of her course, students think about electronics on the body and create quick on-body electronic devices in the spirit of Chindogu. Chindogu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like a solution to a particular problem. However, chindogu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, chindogu devices are sometimes described as "unuseless" – that is, they cannot be regarded as "useless" in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called "useful.”

Week two involves studying microcontrollers, processing, and biosensors. Students participate in the Unicef Wearables for Good Challenge during the final three weeks. The goal is to develop innovative, affordable solutions to make wearables and sensor technology a game-changer for women and children across the world. This summer, students ended up with promising ideas such as devices that address air pollution, child trafficking, breastfeeding, maternal prenatal anemia, biometric screening, water transportation and filtration, and medication compliance and tracking.

In addition to the sixty students, seven BME faculty members taught classes and led field trips. The west side of Ireland has become the European capital for the healthcare and medical device industries. The majority of the companies (e.g. Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Cook Medical, Abbott, etc.) are international.  Some of the company field trip visits included Medtronic, Visktakon, and Cook Medical. Located in Limerick, Cook Medical is a maker of catheters, stents, and drug coated stents. On this tour, students saw the handling of raw materials, incoming quality control, a controlled manufacturing area, finish quality control [including destructive testing with samples of each lot], post-sterilization, and batch release.

In the spring of 2016,  sign up for the next summer BME study abroad to the National University of Ireland, Galway will begin.

BME student Joy Janku said, ”wearables was one of my favorite classes taken at Georgia Tech. We gained a lot of interactive product experience by being exposed to tools like Littlebits and Arduino, and were provided with high quality 3D printers that everyone was able to get hands on experience with to bring our products to life. Secondly, and more importantly to me, we were asked to design for those in need by participating in the UNICEF Challenge which made the project feel that much more tangible.” 

The Georgia Tech Communic-AID team submitted their idea to this global technology challenge and are now one of ten global UNICEF team finalists. More than 250 submissions from 46 countries across 6 continents entered the contest. Winners of this global wearable technology contest will be announced November, 2015.

UNICEF interviews Raja Schaar: Why budding designers should keep social impact in mind when designing

CONTACT:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

With her biomedical engineering and medical interests, she sought to apply to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other federal health-related departments. She ended up accepting an internship with Price, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for more than 10 years. More importantly to See, Price worked in private practice as an orthopedic surgeon. Before his election to Congress, Price was an assistant professor at Emory University’s School of Medicine and medical director of the orthopedic clinic at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, teaching resident doctors in training.

“While the majority of what I did was quite different than anything in my BME major or even the engineering curricula at Georgia Tech, I came across many things in Washington that relate to biomedical research and remind me of my classes and professors,” said See, who is from Memphis, Tennessee.

One of those things is the 21^st Century Cures Act (HR 6), federal legislation that received overwhelming bipartisan approval in the House of Representatives. Among other things, the act makes research collaborations easier; incorporates the patient perspective in drug development and the regulatory review process; promotes personalized medicine; streamlines clinical trials, making it less expensive to bring drugs to market; provides incentives for developing drugs that treat rare diseases; and basically helps “the entire biomedical ecosystem coordinate more efficiently to find faster cures while investing in 21^st century science and next generation investigators,” according to See.

The 21^st Century Cures Act, which has moved to the Senate for consideration there, would also create a $10 billion innovation fund over five years for the NIH and a $550 million innovation fund for the FDA. In addition, there are special provisions to make room for young or new researchers. 

“I had the opportunity to attend healthcare and medical briefings almost everyday, put on by third-party organizations or offices trying to gain support for their legislation,” said See. 

To her surprise, one briefing featured Ravi Bellamkonda, chair of the Coulter Department at Georgia Tech and Emory (and president of The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering). After the briefing, See sat in on a meeting with Bellamkonda and Robert Knotts, director of federal relations for Georgia Tech, during sessions with congressional office staffers. 

In the Georgia Tech D.C. Internship program, students work full time with a member of Congress, a congressional committee, or an executive branch office in or around Washington, D.C., for about 10 weeks during the summer, and 16 weeks during spring or fall. Students secure their own internship based on academic performance and personal interests. The opportunity includes a $5,000 stipend in the summer or a $7,500 stipend in the spring or fall to offset expenses (housing, transportation, and living expenses). This program is open to both undergraduate and graduate students of all majors. 

In See’s case, the experience took her outside of the usual BME comfort zones.

“Working on legislation is not something the average biomedical engineer has the opportunity to do,” she said. “While this may not further me in a medical career, learning about the legislative process is extremely important. I learned that so much of what biomedical engineers accomplish is funded by government agencies and that all of the regulations in the health and science industry flow through the government.”

See gained new insights and came away with some ideas on how the process might be improved, and how she might become part of the process. 

“If researchers and doctors helped make the regulations on the front end, I think we would not only save time and money, but better policies could be developed at the onset,” she said. “I had a lot of opportunities to learn about the government's involvement and investment in healthcare and medical research. I may have some interest in going into medical policy, so I think this was great exposure."

Read more about the internship program here.

CONTACT:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Stanislav Emelianov

Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Microelectronics and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, joint appointment with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ph.D., Moscow State University

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan

Area of focus: Imaging and Cancer Technologies

Stanislav Emelianov received his Ph.D. degree from Moscow State University, Russia. He was previously professor of biomedical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and an adjunct professor of imaging physics at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Emelianov’s research interests are in the areas of intelligent diagnostic imaging and patient-specific image-guided therapeutics including cancer imaging and diagnosis, the detection and treatment of atherosclerosis, the development of imaging and therapeutic nanoagents, guided drug delivery and controlled release, simultaneous anatomical, functional, cellular and molecular imaging, multi-modal imaging, and image-guided therapy.

----------

Ravi Kane

Garry Betty Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cancer Nanotechnology, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University

Area of focus: Nanotechnology

Ravi Kane went to graduate school at MIT where he received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. Kane’s research lies at the interface of biotechnology and nanotechnology. His group is designing nanoscale polyvalent therapeutics and working on the molecular engineering of biosurfaces and nanostructures. Kane was previously named by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the TR100 – the top 100 young innovators in the world. After postdoctoral research at Harvard University, Kane joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute eventually becoming head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

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Machelle Pardue

Professor

Ph.D., University of Waterloo

Postdoctoral Fellow, Loyola University

Area of focus: Neuroengineering

Machelle Pardue is also a research career scientist at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, and an associate professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at Emory University School of Medicine. Pardue received her Ph.D. in vision science and biology at the University of Waterloo. Her research has been continuously supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs, NIH, and private companies. Pardue’s laboratory uses a combination of electrophysiological, histological, imaging, and molecular techniques to investigate the pathophysiology of retinal disease and develop treatments and therapies to preserve or restore vision. Her current research focuses on retinal degenerations, diabetic retinopathy, and myopia.

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Timothy Cope

Professor, joint appointment with the School of Applied Physiology

Ph.D., Duke University

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Washington

Area of focus: Neuroengineering

Timothy Cope’s research interests center on control of movement by sensorimotor integration in the mammalian spinal cord. Using predominantly electrophysiological methods applied in vivo, his group studies neural signaling by spinal motoneurons, somatosensory neurons, and their central synapses. Their primary analyses include electrical properties, synaptic function, and firing behavior of single neurons. His group is actively examining how these neurons and synapses respond soon and long after peripheral nerve injury and regeneration. Recent findings demonstrate that successful regeneration of damaged sensory axons does not prevent complex reorganization of their synaptic connections made within the spinal cord. He also continues to explore fundamental operations of the normal adult nervous system.

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Bilal Haider

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Yale University

Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London

Area of focus: Neuroengineering

Bilal Haider’s research goal is to identify cellular and circuit mechanisms that modulate neuronal responsiveness in the cerebral cortex in vivo.

He has identified excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms in vivo that mediate rapid initiation, sustenance, and termination of persistent activity in the cortex. He is investigating the role of inhibitory circuits during wakefulness. His work showed for the first time that synaptic inhibition powerfully controls the spatial and temporal properties of visual processing in the awake cortex. His future research will investigate mechanisms used by excitatory and inhibitory neuronal sub-types in the cortex during goal-directed behaviors.

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Annabelle Singer

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., University of California San Francisco

Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Area of focus: Neuroengineering

For a hundred years, scientists have investigated neural codes, patterns of neural spiking activity from single to hundreds of cells, to try to understand how this activity represents experiences. Annabelle Singer’s research elucidates how such neural activity is decoded at multiple levels: from downstream cells receiving this activity via synaptic inputs to the behavior driven by such activity. To do this she uses a combination of novel electrophysiological, behavioral, optogenetic, and computational tools to determine how neural activity is received and interpreted by downstream cells in awake behaving animals and how neural activity drives behavior.

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James Dahlman

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Postdoctoral Fellow, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Area of focus: Drug Delivery and Cardiovascular Engineering

James Dahlman is a chemical and bioengineer whose work lies at the interface of nanotechnology, genomics, and gene editing. He studied in vivo gene editing at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; he received his Ph.D. from MIT and Harvard Medical School. Dahlman is interested in drug delivery, targeted in vivo gene editing, and using genomics to improve biomaterial design. He has designed and synthesized nanoparticles that efficiently deliver RNAs to the lung and heart. These nanoparticles can deliver multiple RNAs at once, and can simultaneously knockdown five genes concurrently in vivo. They have been used by over ten labs across the United States to study cancer, atherosclerosis, inflammation, emphysema, and pulmonary hypertension, and are being evaluated for clinical trials.

----------

Frank L. Hammond III

Assistant Professor, joint appointment with the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University

Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Area of focus: Healthcare Robotics

Frank Hammond has dedicated much of his academic career to conducting research as a mechanical engineer and roboticist. A vast majority of that time has been spent at the intersection of robotics and healthcare. His research efforts are centered on the development of adaptive robotic manipulation systems: robotic devices having morphological structures, actuation topologies, and sensing and control schemes that make them well-suited to operating alongside or in the place of humans in unstructured, dynamically varying environments. Adaptive robotic devices have several promising, clinically-relevant applications and have demonstrated the potential to improve standards of care and patient accessibility to treatments in areas such as teleoperative microsurgery and at-home physical therapy.

----------

Denis Tsygankov

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina

Area of focus: Mechanics and Systems Biology

Denis Tsygankov obtained his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology where his research interests were on synchronization phenomena in coupled dynamical systems. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park, Tsygankov applied his knowledge of theoretical physics to study biological systems. His research during this time focused on energy transduction and force degeneration by molecular motors, such as kinesin and dynein. His current research is focused on developing and applying computational methods, including mathematical modeling, simulations, and computer vision approaches to understand complex multi-scale physiological processes including vasculogenesis, morphogenesis, and wound healing.

Contact:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Scientists from engineering, biology, chemistry, and computing won’t discover new vaccines and medical devices — or advance what we know about diseases — by working on their own. The next biomedical breakthroughs to provide accessible health care for billions of people worldwide will come from the collaboration between different laboratories and disciplines.

That core belief led to the creation of the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB), the newest building at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The site opened in May and a formal dedication ceremony was held today. 

EBB houses labs for research in chemical biology, cell and developmental biology, and systems biology. The building allows Georgia Tech to consolidate its biomedical research efforts in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, infections, and other life-threatening conditions.

President G.P. “Bud” Peterson said the building symbolizes what Georgia Tech is all about — collaboration and innovation.

“The EBB will drive innovation and have an undeniable impact on biomedical science and human health,” Peterson said. “EBB brings together some of the world’s finest researchers in a collaborative environment, and these collaborations will result in incredible breakthroughs.”

The building provides nearly 219,000 square feet of multidisciplinary research space and enhances the Institute’s partnerships with Emory University Hospital and with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“Together, we are changing the lives of children,” said Donna Hyland, president and CEO of Children’s Healthcare. “The space within this building helps bring our new Pediatric Technology Center to life and gives researchers another place to combine expertise in clinical care, research, and technology to solve problems that will help make kids better today and healthier tomorrow.”

The building is located on 10th Street, at the north end of the existing biotechnology complex. Other buildings in the complex include: the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, the U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building, the Ford Environmental Science and Technology Building, and the Molecular Science and Engineering Building.

More than 140 faculty and nearly 1,000 graduate students from 10 different academic units work in the labs and facilities there.

“EBB puts Georgia Tech at the forefront of biosciences and bioengineering research,” said M.G. Finn, professor and chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The building’s unique design allows Georgia Tech researchers to expand their work, he said.

EBB contains “research neighborhoods” designed around a specific focus or topic. These neighborhoods bring together scientists, engineers, and researchers from different disciplines around common themes or areas of interest. They share laboratories, offices, and common spaces.

Stairs alternate on various floors, encouraging people to move within the neighborhoods and throughout the building and interact with one another. Small and informal meeting areas are located near the stairwells, to further encourage researchers to talk with one another.

“We will help, influence, and support one another and bring new insights in a way that can’t happen if a building is restricted to a particular department or discipline,” Finn said.

“Ultimately we are all working to fight disease and save lives,” he said. “EBB is designed to foster the research to do just that.”

EBB is the largest building investment in Georgia Tech history. The $113 million building was made possible because of a partnership between the Institute, the Georgia Tech Foundation, and the State of Georgia, Peterson said.

State appropriations provided $64 million for the project. Georgia Tech provided $15 million in Institute funds, and private funding raised another $34 million in commitments pledged over five years.

EBB will help drive Georgia’s economy, Peterson said.

“It will foster economic development through the formation of startup enterprises, the creation of high-skilled, high-paying jobs, and the commercialization of new devices, drugs, and technologies,” Peterson said.

Many medical devices used on children were designed for adults. And because the market for children’s medical devices is small, many companies shy away from building medical technologies for children.

Georgia Tech is helping to fill that gap in the market. From an app that allows parents to send pictures of their child’s potential ear infection to a doctor, to surgical tools tailored to a child’s physiology, the Institute is leading the push toward improving and saving children’s lives through technology.

Read more about the “Small Wonders” evolving in Georgia Tech labs in this article from Research Horizons.

The Georgia Tech College of Engineering continues to be recognized as one of the best in the nation, ranking fifth, in the annual undergraduate engineering program rankings released in September, 2015. Each of the College of Engineering's 10 undergraduate degrees programs was ranked seventh or higher in their respective fields with six programs ranked fourth or higher in this year's rankings.

“We are proud to once again be recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the elite engineering institutions in the United States," said Gary S. May, dean and Southern Company Chair in the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. "The strength of our college is the depth and breadth of our programs, and it is gratifying to see so many of our individual schools ranked among the best in their fields. With 10 highly ranked programs housed within one college we are in a unique position to offer an unparalleled interdisciplinary educational experience to the next generation of the world's engineers.“

“For almost two decades Georgia Tech has ranked in the top 10 among public research universities. While we are well known for excellence in engineering and other STEM fields, word is also getting out about our other outstanding programs, such as our undergraduate business program, along with our focus on innovation,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson.

Georgia Tech ranked seventh among public universities and 36th among all national universities in the 2016 Best Colleges undergraduate rankings by U.S. News & World Report.

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

But what exactly does it take to move a lab?

“You would think that you could just get a mover and ship everything and be done, and that hasn’t been the case,” said Erin Kirshtein, who manages research projects and grants for Associate Professor Thomas Barker’s Matrix Biology and Engineering Lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Every little section has its own little piece that needs multiple hands.”

Read more about what it takes to move the labs that produce some of the world's top research.

“The Georgia Tech BME team did an amazing job of representing our department and our university,” said James Rains, BME’s director of capstone design in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.  “I received many compliments regarding their performance throughout the event, but was blown away with their great team work, ingenuity, and polished presentation skills.” 

Coulter College is a training program focused on translation of biomedical innovations. Student design teams are guided by faculty and clinical experts through a highly dynamic process designed to help them better understand how innovations can meet clinical needs while providing tools and approaches used to evolve identified problems into novel solutions. The program is supported by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.

In the competition, student teams are given a list of unmet clinical needs, they research and rank their top choices. Shortly afterwards, they are notified of the unmet clinical need they will address and given an assignment to prepare. In this case, they were asked to work on an epidural system.

“The design process is one of my favorite things about being an engineering student,” said BME student Alex Hubbard. “The Coulter College made designing even more fun by providing each team with a box of materials like modeling clay, Tinker Toys, pipe cleaners, and trig cards with interesting prompts to encourage creativity while brainstorming. We followed a ‘no-negativity’ rule such that whenever someone had an idea that seemed far-fetched, we weren't allowed to say anything negative about it, so we went off on several crazy tangents.  One of these tangents was inspired by reading cards that encouraged us to relocate the epidural process or alter the process such that a physician wouldn't need to come near the patient, both of which seem ridiculous at first glance.  However, a few crazy tangents later, we came upon the idea of encasing the medications delivered during a normal epidural injection in a hydrogel or other polymer, injecting that solution into the patient's epidural space weeks before the due date, and activating it via ultrasound upon when the patient arrives at the hospital to give birth.”

Cory Turbyfield added, ”for me, the coolest part of the competition was all of the people there: BME students, professors, clinicians, CEOs, designers, professionals, and more. Everyone brought with them their own set of experiences, and we had the opportunity to learn from each and everyone one of them.”

The team’s idea and subsequent presentation earned the team the best design award at the competition.

 “They worked their butts off staying up to 3:00 a.m. each night and being there bright and early at 7:00 a.m. to start it all over again— for four consecutive days.  I am not sure how they were able to even start classes on Monday,” said Rains.

Contact:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

RNA is unstable and cumbersome, and just getting it into the body without having it break down is difficult. Once that hurdle is met, there is another: the vast majority of the drug is taken up by the liver. Many current RNA-based approaches turn this apparent bug into a strength, because they seek to treat liver diseases. 

But what if you need to deliver RNA somewhere besides the liver?

Biomedical engineer Hanjoong Jo’s lab at Emory/Georgia Tech, working with Katherine Ferrara’s group at UC Davis, has developed technology to broaden the liver-dominant properties of RNA-based drugs.

The results were recently published in ACS Nano. The researchers show they can selectively target an anti-microRNA agent to inflamed blood vessels in mice while avoiding other tissues.

“We have solved a major obstacle of using anti-miRNA as a therapeutic by being able to do a targeted delivery to only inflamed endothelial cells while all other tissues examined, including liver, lung, kidney, blood cells, spleen, etc. showed no detectable side-effects,” Jo says.

Research by Jo’s lab, published in 2013 in Nature Communications, had established that microRNA 712 was a master controller of inflammation in atherosclerosis.

In the Nature Communications paper, an antisense molecule that counteracts miRNA 712 can stop the effects of high fat diet and disturbed blood flow in the atherosclerosis model. It reaches the desired cells: endothelial cells, which line blood vessels. But the anti-miRNA has significant effects on the liver and blood cells at the same time.

To restrict delivery of an antisense molecule countering miRNA 712 to endothelial cells, the authors built nanoparticles with several layers. Inside was the payload: the anti-miRNA, packaged with a positively charged lipid. Around that is a neutral coating, decorated with a peptide that targets the inflammatory molecule vascular cell adhesion molecule 1. The same peptide has previously been tested as a potential cardiovascular imaging tool.

The resulting multi-layer package was delivered selectively to only the inflamed endothelial cells, the authors show in the ACS Nano paper. In the atherosclerosis mouse model, it was possible to use five times less than the “naked” untargeted version and still see beneficial effects.

The multi-layer packaging method could easily be adapted to other miRNAs, such as the human equivalent miR-205, in the context of treating atherosclerosis. However, using other targeting peptides, with the goal of reaching other tissues, would be a bigger stretch.

Hanjoong Jo is the associate chair and John and Jan Portman Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. 

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Quinn Eastman   
Research Communications
Woodruff Health Sciences Center
Emory University

The GRA Academy of Eminent Scholars numbers 63, and in 2014, was responsible for generating more than $300 million in competitively-funded research activity. GRA Eminent Scholars employ some 1,200 faculty, graduate students, and technicians in their labs, and last year filed 47 invention disclosures and were granted 23 patent applications. 

Kane and Emelianov come to Georgia Tech from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Texas at Austin, respectively, while Divan returns to Tech after taking a four-year leave to establish an electrical energy startup company in the Bay Area.

“We are proud to welcome Deepak Divan, Stanislav Emelianov, and Ravi Kane to our Academy and to Georgia Tech,” said C. Michael Cassidy, President and CEO, Georgia Research Alliance. “They bring to Georgia vast knowledge and expertise that will help to further development in the fields of cancer nanotechnology, energy management, and medical imaging.”

Ravi Kane Joins ChBE as Betty Chair/Eminent Scholar

Ravi Kane has joined the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as a professor and holder of the Garry Betty/V Foundation Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Cancer Nanotechnology. Kane will hold also program faculty status in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Previously, Kane served on the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and held the P.K. Lashmet Professorship.

“Ravi is a wonderfully creative and effective researcher, and we are thrilled to have him join us at Georgia Tech,” said Professor and ChBE School Chair David Sholl.

Holding master’s and doctoral degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kane focuses his research on the interface of biotechnology and nanotechnology.

His research group is designing nanoscale polyvalent therapeutics and working on the molecular engineering of biosurfaces and nanostructures. The Kane group is also interested in using protein engineering, nanotechnology, and other tools to combat cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, influenza, and antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Having contributed to more than 125 scientific publications, Kane has received numerous honors throughout his career. In 2004, MIT Technology Review named him one of the top 100 young innovators in the world.

Since then, he has received an American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award, Global Indus Technovator Award, American Chemical Society’s Biochemical Technology Division Young Investigator Award, Society for Biological Engineers’ Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication, as well as other recognitions for research and teaching excellence.

Elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows in 2013, Kane is a member of the editorial board for the Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Kane’s Chair was endowed by the family of Charles Garrett “Garry” Betty (BS ChBE 1979). Betty was president and CEO of the Internet service provider EarthLink from 1996 until his death from a rare type of cancer in 2007. He was inducted into the Georgia Technology Hall of Fame in 2005.

Betty’s wife, Kathy, received the 2013 College of Engineering’s Dean’s Appreciation Award for her continual support of Tech.

Divan Named as Eminent Scholar/Pippin Professor

Deepak Divan has been appointed as the John E. Pippin Chair Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and as a GRA Eminent Scholar. In this new role, Divan will also serve as director of the Georgia Tech Center for Distributed Energy, which will focus on enabling the transition of the global electrical energy infrastructure from a fossil-fuel powered, top-down controlled system to a massively-distributed, resilient, smart, and sustainable system.

“We are excited to welcome Deepak back to Georgia Tech,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “He is internationally recognized and respected in the electrical energy arena, and he will be an effective leader in developing the energy delivery systems of the future.”

An ECE faculty member since 2004, Divan works in the areas of dynamic grid control, advanced and integrated power electronics, and sustainable energy systems. He is known for his seminal work in technologies that protect equipment against power disturbances that impact industries such as utilities, semiconductors, automotive, and food processing. He served as director for the Intelligent Power Infrastructure Consortium, a university-industry-utility consortium to foster and accelerate the development and adoption of early-stage, pre-competitive high-risk and high-impact technologies in power applications.

For the last several years, Divan has been on leave in order to establish and lead his third startup company, Varentec, which is funded by leading VCs Khosla Ventures and investor Bill Gates. Varentec, based in Santa Clara, California, builds distributed power management and monitoring solutions for the electric grid. Divan currently serves as the scientific founder and Chief Scientist for the company. He is also the scientific founder of two additional companies–Innovolt, based in Atlanta, which makes next-generation power protection and asset management devices and where he serves on the Board, and Soft Switching Technologies Corporation, where he served as CEO and developed a range of devices to help manufacturing facilities ride through power disturbances. At Soft Switching, Divan also conceptualized and helped to develop the I-Grid, the first publicly accessible Internet-based power monitoring network in the U.S., which allows industries and utilities to diagnose widespread power quality events and unsolved downtime events. Soft Switching was acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2012. Finally, his work at Georgia Tech has provided the foundation for another start-up company – Smart Wires, which is located in Oakland, California, and provides power flow control devices for the transmission grid.

Divan holds more than 60 issued or pending patents, with over half in use by industry, and he has published over 300 refereed journal and conference papers, including 12 outstanding prize paper awards.

In 2015, Divan was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He served as president of the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) in 2009-2010, and he was named as the first recipient of the IEEE Newell Field Medal, the highest honor given by IEEE in the area of power electronics “for leadership in the development of soft-switching power converters.” Divan also served as an IEEE Industry Applications Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2004 and 2005, and he was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1998.

Emelianov Named as Eminent Scholar/Pettit Chair in Microelectronics

Stanislav (Stas) Emelianov has been appointed as the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Microelectronics and as a GRA Eminent Scholar. He is based in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“Stas is a thoughtful and innovative researcher who has made a significant impact in his field, and we are delighted to have him join the ECE and BME faculties at Georgia Tech,” said McLaughlin and Ravi Bellamkonda, the Wallace H. Coulter Chair Professor in BME. “Stas will be a fantastic bridge between ECE and BME, and will also work closely with Winship Cancer Institute to pursue his cancer related research.”

Prior to joining Tech, Emelianov was on the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, he served as the Cockrell Professor of Biomedical Engineering and as an adjunct professor of imaging physics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. His research interests are in the development of advanced imaging methods capable of detecting and diagnosing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other pathologies.

Emelianov also focuses on assisting treatment planning, enhancing image-guided therapy, and monitoring of treatment outcomes. He has led a team that discovered a minimally invasive way to detect plaques that are most likely to cause heart attacks. He has also conducted groundbreaking work on deep vein thrombosis, predicting rupture of plaques for cardiovascular applications, and imaging sentinel lymph nodes and micrometastases for cancer.

Emelianov and his collaborators have published over 470 refereed journal and conference papers and 13 edited books and book chapters, and he has 15 patents that have either been issued or are pending. In serving his professional community, Emelianov is the editor of Photoacoustics and is an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

Emelianov has held leadership roles in ultrasonics conferences and symposia sponsored by both IEEE and SPIE. In addition, he is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Society for Engineering Education. He was also elected to the College of Fellows for the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2011.

While at UT-Austin, Emelianov served as the BME associate chair for research and chair of the undergraduate curriculum committee, and he received several teaching awards at both the department and university levels. He has graduated 20 Ph.D. students and four M.S. students, many of whom have received fellowships, national research service awards, and honors and awards from both IEEE and SPIE. He has also advised 45 undergraduate researchers.

Story Contributors: Brad Dixon, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 404-385-2299; Jackie Nemeth, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 404-894-2906; Walter Rich, Biomedical Engineering, 404-385-2416.

She and a team of Emory and Georgia Tech researchers were awarded a five-year, $8.9 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to better understand how reactive oxygen species and inflammation can be both necessary for blood vessels to function, but detrimental in excess. The team’s work will explore strategies for targeted intervention, possibly leading to new preventive approaches for conditions such as atherosclerosis and aortic aneurysms.

 “This award highlights the core strength we have built at Emory in understanding how vital signals such as ROS function in vascular biology,” says Griendling. “Our long-standing interest in this area is beginning to bear fruit in terms of translational approaches.” 

Griendling is professor and vice-chair of research and faculty development in the Department of Medicine within Emory University School of Medicine. The team includes Hanjoong Jo, Ph.D., John and Jan Portman professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; W. Robert Taylor, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and director of cardiology at Emory University School of Medicine and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory; and Alejandra San Martin, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine (cardiology) at Emory.

 “This award represents a long-standing collaboration between investigators in cardiology at Emory and biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory,” Jo says.

Using a well-developed model of rapid atherosclerosis induced by disturbed blood flow in mice, Jo’s laboratory will investigate a potential drug target: bone morphogenic protein receptor 2 or BMPR2. The BMPR2 gene has been connected in human studies with pulmonary hypertension.

Griendling and San Martin are investigating Nox enzymes, which produce reactive oxygen species, and the Nox partner protein Poldip2’s roles in aortic stiffening and smooth muscle metabolism and proliferation. Taylor is probing another potential drug target, the antioxidant enzyme catalase, which has been shown to modulate blood vessel stiffness and aneurysm formation.

CONTACT:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
wrich@gatech.edu

It’s important to examine the fundamental cell biology principles that govern this process, to reach a better understanding of developmental biology and engineering novel multicellular systems, but there are a number of challenges. 

Functional micro-tissues derived from pluripotent embryonic stem cell (ESC) aggregates provide novel platforms for experimentation, but clarifying the factors that direct emergent spatial phenotypic patterns remains a hurdle. Computational modeling offers a complementary approach and provides a wealth of spatiotemporal data, but quantitative analysis of simulations and comparison to the experimental data is difficult. 

Quantitative descriptions of spatial phenomena across multiple systems and scales would enable unprecedented comparisons of computational simulations with experimental systems and leverage the ability of computational methods to interrogate the mechanisms of multicellular biology. 

To address these challenges, a group of researchers from multiple disciplines at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an innovative, portable pattern recognition pipeline, the first of its kind.

“There is a lot of biological data available. To some extent, it’s all image data, whether we’re talking about confocal microscopy or two-dimensional images of cells. The field has made significant advances the last 10 or 15 years in terms of quantifying images, but there are still gaping holes in terms of quantifying spatial patterns and how those emerge in cells over time,” says Doug White, lead author of a research paper entitled, “Quantitative multivariate analysis of dynamic multicellular morphogenic trajectories,” published this summer in the journal Integrative Biology (a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry).

White, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, now manages a team using mathematical modeling approaches to understand the guiding principles behind cancer drug design, for Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Boston. The research paper is the result of work he began about three years ago. His Ph.D. was focused on understanding stem cell biology using computational modeling. 

“We set out to come up with a method that was portable across multiple system that anybody can use, but still powerful enough to extract meaningful data,” he says.

The pipeline permits entirely new forms of quantitative analysis based upon the fundamental interconnectivity of multicellular networks, which the research team believes could revolutionize the characterization of biologically complex spatiotemporal phenomena. And it’s the first network-based approach currently capable of using single cell information on spatial positioning and cellular states to classify tissue level pattern dynamics.

“The Petit Institute has instruments that measure different images with different resolutions,” says Melissa Kemp, associate professor in the Coulter Department, faculty member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, who co-authored the paper and was White’s co-advisor. “This pipeline allows us to take any of those images of multicellular structures and redefines the structure in terms of individual cells. Once you can define those individual entities within the image, you can create these network structures.”

Their innovation is their ability to take a plain image from a microscope and turn it into a network structure, much like LinkedIn or Facebook uses to study social connections. “We can then use newly defined features of those structures as they evolve over time to understand the underlying biology,” Kemp says.

The interdisciplinary team contributing to the research paper includes Petit Institute faculty members Hang Lu (professor and James R. Fair Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) and Todd Streelman (professor and associate chair for graduate studies in the School of Biology), as well as White’s co-advisor Todd McDevitt, who left Georgia Tech last year to join the Gladstone Institute. Other co-authors were Jonathan Sylvester (postdoctoral fellow in the Streelman lab) and Thomas Levario (graduate student in the Lu lab). All, with the exception of McDevitt, are now based in the new Engineered Biosystems Building in the cell and developmental bioengineering neighborhood.

“We’re excited about how this could be used in other prediction-based studies,” Kemp says.

The nice thing about the technology is its portability across many imaging modalities, according to White, who adds, “The sky is the limit in terms of what this technology is capable of.”

CONTACT

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience 

An engineering example of closed-loop control is a simple thermostat used to maintain a steady temperature in the home. Without it, heating or air conditioning would run without reacting to changes in outside conditions, allowing inside temperatures to vary dramatically.

Optogenetics technology places genes that express light-sensitive proteins into mammalian cells that normally lack such proteins. When the proteins are illuminated with specific wavelengths of light, they change the behavior of the cells, introducing certain types of ions or pushing ions out of the cells to alter electrical activity. But without a feedback loop, scientists could only assume that the optical signals were having the effects desired – or try to confirm at the end of the experiment that this had happened.

To address that shortcoming, researchers have created an open-source technology called the optoclamp which closes the loop in optogenetic systems. The technique uses a computer to acquire and process the neuronal response to the optical stimulus in real-time and then vary the light input to maintain a desired firing rate. By providing this feedback control, the optoclamp could facilitate research into new therapies for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain – and even depression.

“Our work establishes a versatile test bed for creating the responsive neurotherapeutic tools of the future,” said Steve Potter, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Neural modulation therapies of the future, whether they be targeted drug delivery, electrical stimulation or even light-plus-optogenetics through fiber optics, will all be closed loop. That means they will be responsive to the moment-to-moment needs of the nervous system.”

The research, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, was recently published in the open-access journal eLife. Feedback control already exists for neural stimulation systems based on electrical inputs, but the optoclamp is the first system to provide similar closed-loop control for optical stimulation.

Optoclamp provides continuous, real-time adjustments of optical stimulation to lock neural spiking activity to specified targets over time scales ranging from seconds to days. By providing precise optical control of firing in neuronal populations, the technology will help scientists disentangle causally related variables of circuit activation.

Researchers in Potter’s lab studied the effects of open-loop optical stimulation on neural systems, and found considerable variation in the responses of neuronal networks grown on multi-electrode arrays and in the neurons of animal models.

“The same stimulus pattern can produce highly variable levels of activity,” said Jon Newman, who built the optoclamp while a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s Laboratory for Neuroengineering. Newman is now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. “The amount of optical stimulation needed to achieve the same level of activity varied by orders of magnitude, depending on the population that was being controlled, or even in the same type of cells and preparation, but within different subjects.”

In a cultured cortical network, the optoclamp records activity from as many as 200 cells, using them to measure activity in the larger culture population, which can include as many as a million cells.

“Because we have all those electrodes, we can process the data in real-time and then compare the amount of activity being expressed by the culture to a target rate, then use the difference between those two signals to inform our optical stimulator to vary the intensities of different wavelengths of light,” Newman explained.

The optoclamp can be used to control cell cultures grown atop electrode arrays, as well as in living animal models in which electrodes have been implanted.

In research conducted with colleagues at Emory University, the optoclamp’s ability to maintain a steady neural firing state allowed researchers to study a key control issue in homeostatic plasticity, a phenomenon that results from a lack of neural stimulation. Scientists had believed that the effect was controlled by the firing rate of cells, but the optoclamp allowed a team of researchers from Georgia Tech and Emory University to clamp firing at normal levels during the addition of a drug that inhibits neurotransmission. This showed that neurotransmission levels, not firing activity, governed a key form of homeostatic plasticity.

“Effectively, we were able to decouple two things that are normally very closely related,” said Newman. “This is potentially a very big deal in terms of developing therapies for aberrant forms of synaptic plasticity.” Potential applications include chronic pain, epilepsy, tinnitus, phantom limb syndrome and other nervous systems disorders where the brain has over-reacted to the loss of normal inputs.

That work, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, was a collaboration with Emory University Professor Pete Wenner and former graduate student Ming-fai Fong, demonstrating the value of bringing biological scientists together with engineers. Newman, an engineer by training, says concepts common in engineering can be useful in the life sciences.

“Closed-loop control is a concept that is woven through all engineered systems, but it’s often hard to find in the biological sciences,” he said. “Any time you can introduce feedback control into an experiment, it almost always produces better control of the variables of interest. Feedback control is an extremely important concept for the life sciences.”

Scientists are already using the optoclamp in its current form, but the researchers hope to improve spatial differentiation of the optical signals, allowing experiments to focus stimulation on specific areas of the brain or brain cell cultures. The light signals now affect an entire culture or brain region.

“We want to precisely control where photons are being sent to activate different cells,” Newman said. “Optogenetics allows genetic specification of which cells express these proteins, and that gives you some level of spatial control. But I don’t believe that’s as precise as what will be required to speak the language of the brain.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Professor Garrett Stanley from the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and graduate students Daniel C. Millard and Clarissa J. Whitmire, also from the Coulter Department.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience grant IOS-1131948 and Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation grant 1238097, and by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grant 2R01NS048285 and National Institute of Neurological Disorders grant 1R01NS079757-01. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health.

CITATIONS:
Newman, J. P., Fong, M-f, Millard, D. C., Whitmire, C. J., Stanley, G. B., & Potter, S. M., “Optogenetic feedback control of neural activity,” (eLife, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07192.

Ming-fai Fong, et al, “Upward synaptic scaling is dependent on neurotransmission rather than spiking,” (Nature Communications, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7339.

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Prior to joining Tech, Emelianov was on the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, he served as the Cockrell Professor of Biomedical Engineering and as an adjunct professor of imaging physics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. His research interests are in the development of advanced imaging methods capable of detecting and diagnosing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other pathologies.

Emelianov also focuses on assisting treatment planning, enhancing image-guided therapy, and monitoring of treatment outcomes. He has led a team that discovered a minimally invasive way to detect plaques that are most likely to cause heart attacks. He has also conducted groundbreaking work on deep vein thrombosis, predicting rupture of plaques for cardiovascular applications, and imaging sentinel lymph nodes and micrometastases for cancer.

Emelianov and his collaborators have published over 470 refereed journal and conference papers and 13 edited books and book chapters, and he has 15 patents that have either been issued or are pending. In serving his professional community, Emelianov is the editor of Photoacoustics and is an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

Emelianov has held leadership roles in ultrasonics conferences and symposia sponsored by both IEEE and SPIE. In addition, he is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Society for Engineering Education. He was also elected to the College of Fellows for the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2011.

While at UT-Austin, Emelianov served as the BME associate chair for research and chair of the undergraduate curriculum committee, and he received several teaching awards at both the department and university levels. He has graduated 20 Ph.D. students and four M.S. students, many of whom have received fellowships, national research service awards, and honors and awards from both IEEE and SPIE. He has also advised 45 undergraduate researchers.

During the last 20 years, Korea has become a global leader and powerhouse of technology research and manufacturing. Korean companies and universities are at the cutting edge of science research and product innovation in many areas—this includes medical research. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, South Korea has increased spending on medical research by 24 percent.

“KAIST is clearly recognized as one of the best technology, science and engineering universities in the world,” said Hanjoong Jo, associate chair of the BME department. “Joint biomedical research projects between KAIST, Emory and Georgia Tech would take full advantage of many synergies offered by each school’s unique faculty expertise and core research laboratories.” 

The five professors from Georgia Tech and Emory’s BME department that traveled to visit KAIST at their main campus in Daejeon were Ravi Bellamkonda, Hanjoong Jo, Garrett Stanley, Xiaoping Hu, and May Wang. 

The professors in attendance from KAIST were Jong Chul Ye, Do-heon Lee, Philnam Kim, Ji-ho Park, Jung-Kyun Choi, Se-Bum Paik, Christopher Fiorillo, Sung-Hong Park, Ki-Hun Jeong, Dongsup Kim, Gwan-Su Yi, Sue-Hyun Lee, Yong Jeong, Yoonkey Nam, and Young-Ho Cho. 

The workshop sought to identify impactful, long-term projects with realistic funding opportunities to forge new frontiers in medical science and engineering knowledge.

“I was very impressed by the dedication of faculty members within the department of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory that makes this workshop very successful.  Our faculty members at KAIST believe this is a good starting point for KAIST and Georgia Tech/Emory bioengineering department to work together with the same vision to become the world leader in bioengineering areas,” said interim-chair professor Jong-Chul Ye.

Recently elected department chair, professor Kwang-Hyun Cho, envisioned that he wants to further extend this joint workshop for fruitful collaboration between Georgia Tech, Emory, and KAIST in both research and education, and to use this opportunity as a common bridge for enhancing our international visibility in biomedical engineering.  

In addition to pure research, exchange opportunities and educational programs are being developed for top biomedical engineering scholars to further their studies and research at either Georgia Tech, Emory or KAIST. 

For further info, contact:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
wrich@gatech.edu

Wang is a Petit Undergraduate Research Scholar in the lab of Wilbur Lam, and Mannino, a grad student and a former Petit Scholar, is his mentor. The two biomedical engineering students, with a team of researchers in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, have created a way to investigate biophysical cellular interactions in the circulation system using common, off-the-shelf lab materials.

“For the last five years our lab has focused on developing fake blood vessels, so to speak, for research,” says Lam, assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a joint department of Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology). “We’ve developed a platform technology in which we use microfabrication technologies to make these in vitro models of blood vessels.” 

Essentially, they use the same technologies that computer engineers and the software and computer hardware industries use to make microfluidics. Lam’s group developed a process in which they grow endothelial cells (the interior surface of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels) in really small channels to allow cellular biophysics experimentation in an in vitro setting.

“The process is not trivial,” says Mannino, who as an undergrad started thinking about a simpler process to meet the same complicated needs, “to make these systems more accessible to biologists and cardiovascular researchers who are really interested in questions of how different blood systems interact with each other and with the endothelium.”

This kind of research traditionally takes expensive equipment and engineering expertise in microfabrication. But now, researchers who want to understand biophysical cellular reactions and their relation to health and/or disease have a more user-friendly path to enlightenment. “Rob came up with a brilliant technique which really only requires some silicone and some wire,” says Lam.

The research team has recently published the recipe in the journal Nature: Scientific Reports, a paper entitled, “Do-it-yourself in vitro vasculature that recapitulates in vivo geometries for investigating endothelial-blood cell interactions.” In addition to Mannino (the lead author), Wang and Lam, the team of multidisciplinary authors/researchers includes David R. Myers (postdoc in the Lam lab, and Mannino’s former Petit Scholar mentor), Byungwook Ahn (former postdoc in the Lam lab), Margo Rollins (pediatric hematologist/oncology fellow at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta), Hope Gole (former postdoc in the Lam lab), Angela Lin (research engineer in the Bob Guldberg lab), Bob Guldberg (executive director of the Petit Institute, professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), Don Giddens (Dean Emeritus of the Coulter Department), and Lucas Timmins (former postdoc in the Timmins lab).

“This process is accessible to biologists, not just experienced engineers, and it effectively enables us to observe the process by which the blood cells and endothelial cells function together in the human body” says Wang.

One driving factor in the research, according to Mannino, was economics. “We’ve reduced the time it takes and also the cost,” he says.

And now Wang, the Petit Scholar, is taking the research to the next step. “He’s studying sickle cell biomechanics,” Mannino says. “Basically, this will be the first practical application of the device.”

Wang will leverage the advantages of the system Mannino conceived, “towards questions that really couldn’t be answered with any other type of device,” Lam says. “This kind of system is great for asking questions related to biophysics and how these cell interactions occur in normal processes and how they go awry in diseased processes.”

Using the new system, Wang can make a model of an artificial blood vessel, with tight control of the geometry and curvature, and investigate how endothelial cells pathologically respond. This is important stuff, because while we know that blood vessels in sickle cell disease are, in fact, diseased, putting patients at risk for stroke, we really don’t understand why.

“So Payne is essentially asking this biophysical question of, how does the shape or curvature or the geometry of the blood vessel itself affect these cellular interactions in sickle cell disease and only an in vitro system like this can we answer that question. These experiments can’t be conducted in vivo as there are too many other confounding issues,” says Lam, also a physician with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. 

Wang is planning to present his research later this year at the Biomedical Engineering Society annual meeting in October, and also at the American Society of Hematology annual meeting in December. He says the Petit Scholarship experience is making it possible.

“The Petit Scholarship has provided me the opportunity to carry on with my project,” says Wang. “And there’s still a lot to be discovered in this area, a lot more work to do.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Kane is a brand new professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (where he is the Kathy and Garry Betty Faculty Chair), having lately arrived at the Georgia Institute of Technology following 14 years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he headed the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Before taking his career to Rensselaer, Kane served a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard. He graduated with distinction from Stanford with a B.S. in chemical engineering and earned his graduate degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Kane is interested in research at the interface of biotechnology and nanotechnology. His work has focused on the engineering of therapeutics (polyvalent molecules and viral gene delivery vectors) and the molecular engineering of bio-surfaces and nanostructures.

The addition of Kane brings the number of Petit Institute faculty to 173.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Fenton, an associate professor in the School of Physics, came to the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012 from Cornell University. Co-creator of the award winning interactive website, TheVirtualHeart.org, Fenton’s research has focused primarily on cardiac dynamics.

Kwong, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, arrived at Georgia Tech in 2014 following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include cancer nanomedicine, engineering immunity, DNA nanotechnology, biomedical micro- and nanosystems, and high throughput biotechnologies. 

Wang is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor and assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Winner of a 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Wang’s research interests include innovating and engineering mixed-signal, radio frequency and mm-Wave integrated systems for wireless communication and bioelectronics applications.

The addition of Fenton, Kwong and Paris bring the number of Petit Institute faculty to 172. 

The technique uses a solution-based method for producing atomic-scale layers of platinum to create hollow, porous structures that can generate catalytic activity both inside and outside the nanocages. The layers are grown on palladium nanocrystal templates, and then the palladium is etched away to leave behind nanocages approximately 20 nanometers in diameter, with between three and six atom-thin layers of platinum.

Use of these nanocage structures in fuel cell electrodes could increase the utilization efficiency of the platinum by a factor of as much as seven, potentially changing the economic viability of the fuel cells.

“We can get the catalytic activity we need by using only a small fraction of the platinum that had been required before,” said Younan Xia, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Xia also holds joint faculty appointments in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We have made hollow nanocages of platinum with walls as thin as a few atomic layers because we don’t want to waste any material in the bulk that does not contribute to the catalytic activity.”

The research – which also involved researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Arizona State University and Xiamen University in China – was reported in the July 24 issue of the journal Science.

Platinum is in high demand as a catalyst for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications. The high cost of platinum needed for the catalysts deposited on electrodes has limited the ability to use low-temperature fuel cells in automobiles and home applications.

In catalytic applications, only the surface layers of platinum contribute to the chemical reaction, leading researchers to develop new structures designed to maximize the amount of platinum exposed to reactants. The hollowing out process reduces the amount of the precious metal not contributing to the reaction, and allows the use of larger nanocrystals that are less susceptible to sintering, an aggregation phenomenon which reduces catalyst surface area.

“We can control the process so well that we have layer-by-layer deposition, creating one layer, two layers or three layers of platinum,” said Xia, who is also a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar. “We can also control the arrangement of atoms on the surface so their catalytic activity can be engineered to fit different types of reactions.”

Hollow platinum structures have been made before, but not with walls this thin, he added.

Earlier work produced shells with wall thicknesses of approximately five nanometers. The new process can produce shell walls less than one nanometer thick. With both the inner layer and outer layer of the porous nanocages contributing to the catalytic activity, the new structures can use up to two-thirds of the platinum atoms in an ultra-thin three-layer shell. Some palladium remains mixed with the platinum in the structures.

“This approach creates the highest possible surface area from a given amount of platinum,” said Xia.

The nanocages can be made in either cubic or octahedral shapes, depending on the palladium nanocrystals used as templates. The shape controls the surface structure, thus engineering the catalytic activity.

The goal of this research was to reduce the cost of the cathodes in fuel cells designed to power automobiles and homes. The fuel cell’s oxygen-reduction reaction takes place at the cathode, and that requires a substantial amount of platinum. By reducing the amount of platinum by up to a factor of seven, the hollow shells could make automotive and home fuel cells more economically feasible.

The researchers measured the durability of the platinum nanocages for oxygen-reduction reaction, and found the catalytic activity dropped by a little more than one-third after 10,000 operating cycles. Earlier efforts to maximize surface area relied on making very small platinum nanoparticles just two or three nanometers in diameter. Particles of that size tended to clump together in a process known as sintering, reducing the surface area.

“By using hollow structures, we can use much larger particle sizes – about 20 nanometers – and we really don’t lose any surface area because we can use both the inside and outside of the structure, and the shells are only a few atomic layers thick,” Xia added. “We expect the durability of these larger particles to be much better.”

Other applications, such as catalytic converters in automobiles, also use substantial amounts of platinum. The new hollow shells are unlikely to be used in automobile catalytic converters because they operate at a temperature beyond what the structures can tolerate. However, the platinum nanocages could find use in other industrial processes such as hydrogenation.

Contributing to the experimental work done at Georgia Tech, researchers at Arizona State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory used their specialized microscopy facilities to map the nanocage structures. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison modeled the system to help understand etching of palladium from the core while preserving the platinum shell.

Researchers have explored alternatives to platinum, but none of the alternatives so far has provided the equivalent amount of catalytic activity in such a small mass, Xia noted.

“If you took all of the platinum that we have available today and made a cube, it would only be seven meters on each side,” he added. “That’s all the platinum we have now, so we need to find the most efficient way to use it.”

Other authors in the paper include Professor Manos Mavrikakis and researchers Luke Roling and Jeffrey Herron from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Miaofang Chi from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Professor Jingyue Liu from Arizona State University, Professor Zhaoxiong Xie from Xiamen University, and Lei Zhang, Xue Wang, Sang-Il Choi, Madeleine Vara and Jinho Park, from Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Lei Zhang, et al., “Platinum-based nanocages with subnanometer-thick walls and well-defined, controllable facets,” (Science, 2015).

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The Coulter program, which partners with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, provides annual awards to research teams that develop products with great commercial potential and meet a well-defined health care need. Each research team pairs scientists or engineers with physicians. This year’s amount also includes $100,000 contributed by the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

“We were very happy with the number of good projects we saw during this year’s funding round,” said Rachael Hagan, who serves as program director for the Coulter Translational Partnership Program. More than 50 applications requesting funding were received this year.

“In June, we vetted each application for its potential to achieve commercial success with the help of professional health care consultants in marketing, regulatory, reimbursement and intellectual property to determine the likelihood of receiving commercial follow-on funding for these health care innovations. Projects that have been selected for funding will continue to work with these business experts to commercially de-risk their technologies to ensure successfully exiting the universities.”

The project awardees this year were:

AnemoCheck: a simple, disposable, handheld biochemical device that is inexpensive, accurate and provides a quantitative evaluation of anemia in less than two minutes (principal investigators: Wilbur Lam and Erika Tyburski).

AngioCloud: cloud-based software that assists interventional neurologists with the selection and deployment of flow diverters for the treatment of unruptured brain aneurysms (principal investigators: Frank Tong and Alessandro Veneziani).

Cardiovascular MR Imaging: method of uploading, displaying, and automatically analyzing cardiovascular magnetic resonance function, viability and perfusion studies (principal investigators: Ernest Garcia, John Oshinski, Gerald Pohost and Anthony Yezzi).

InvisiCool: gel to alleviate heat-related pain while not otherwise affecting the effectiveness of laser treatments (principal investigators: Jeff Dover, Andrei Fedorov and Craig Green).

KIDS: a low-volume, low-error continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) device for pediatric patients. There are currently no FDA-approved CRRT devices for patients who weigh less than 20 kilograms, and the KIDS technology is being developed to meet this unmet need (principal investigators: Shiva Arjunon and Matt Paden).

Levit Catheter:  a drug delivery catheter for localized delivery of therapeutic-seeded hydrogels to the pericardial space (principal investigators: Andres Garcia and Rebecca Levit).

MitraPlug: a transcatheter implant that seeks to “plug” the fluid path, which is seen in patients with mitral regurgitation (principal investigators: Murali Padala and Eric Sarin).

Nanocomposite Scintillators: an imaging replacement for current, expensive crystals (principal investigators: Brooke Beckert, Eric Elder and Jason Nadler).

IC3D: an imaging silicon chip for Chronic Total Occlusion (CTO) procedures with improved visualization for physicians (principal investigators: Levent Degertekin and Habib Samady).

These newly funded academic projects were chosen by a committee composed of Emory doctors, Georgia Tech biomedical engineers and technology transfer representatives from each school. The other half of the selection committee included industry experts, venture capital specialists, serial entrepreneurs and angel investors.

“This seed funding is similar to venture capital funding, except there are no strings attached,” said Hagan. “Our committee picks projects based on a higher probability of receiving  commercial follow-on investment in hopes our best clinical research moves out of our universities to actual patient care.”

“It is tremendously exciting to reinvigorate the Coulter Translational Program with an investment of over $1.5 million per year,” said Ajit Yoganathan, Regents’ Professor and associate chair for translational research in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “The excitement and need for the program was obvious based on the number of initial applications. It demonstrates there is a pipeline of translational projects that has the potential for commercialization at Georgia Tech and Emory. The projects selected for funding cut across various areas of medicine including pediatrics. Funding pediatric technologies is critical, since kids are an underserved population.”

 In 2001, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation made a $25 million grant to the Georgia Tech-Emory biomedical engineering program. In recognition of this grant, the combined department is known as the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. The department combines Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering with Emory’s School of Medicine. The grant also contains a $10 million endowment to provide ongoing funding specifically for translational research. Translational research is part of a continuum in which research findings are moved from a researcher’s laboratory to a patient’s bedside and community. Each year, co-investigators – composed of engineering faculty from Georgia Tech and medical staff and faculty from Emory – apply for commercialization funding that may lead to improvements in patient care.

“Since our inception, our collaborative biomedical engineering department has leveraged academic, industry and donor support to create some of the best physician and engineering teams in the world,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, chair of the Coulter Department. “Our entrepreneurial spirit and culture combined with the world-class facilities at Georgia Tech and Emory result in a unique environment that fosters innovation.  We are fortunate to be able to provide funding to accelerate the development of these promising biomedical technologies so they can reach patients faster and be successfully translated from the laboratory to clinical use.”

The Coulter Department is the Coulter Foundation’s flagship academic institution. The department’s graduate program is ranked number two by U.S. News & World Report. There are an additional 14 universities with Translational Research Partnership Programs supported by the foundation that include distinguished biomedical research institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Duke, Columbia, and Stanford universities.

• Is a role model and sets a positive work example
• Is the person that everyone turns to for support or solutions
• Demonstrates that no job is too big or too small
• Is committed to the delivery of excellent service at all times
• Produces exemplary work

A cash award accompanies the recognition. Dinkins has worked for Georgia Tech for more than 16 years and is responsible for grants management, Georgia Tech foundation accounting, and procurement compliance. The College of Engineering has approximately 350 staff members providing critical support to our faculty, researchers and students.

“I was honored to have been nominated and extremely pleased to have won.  I am so very proud to be part of the BME team, we have something good going on here with important research, a great staff, bright students and excellent faculty.  My work ethic is to always be efficient and knowledgeable about my chosen craft. Being proactive, working smarter and not harder are my number one goals.  I am a teacher at heart so if I can point someone else towards the same work ethic then I do not mind sharing a little knowledge to help get them there. If they succeed at what they do, then I succeed as well,” said Dinkins.

Congratulations from the Biomedical Engineering Department!

Some highlights from his presentation included:

• The United States is a world leader in biomedical engineering (BME)
• Traditional engineering is 20% female, while half of BME students are women
• BME is impacting healthcare in meaningful ways
• The Georgia Tech/Emory partnership is ranked #2 nationally for BME graduate programs
• Bellamkonda’s lab is using nanotechnology to make chemotherapy more effective

You can view his congressional presentation below.

CONTACT: 

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

As a part of a broadening alliance, a SUSS mask aligner will be added to a cluster of Suss equipment currently installed in the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) cleanrooms at Georgia Tech, dedicated for bio-medical device research and fabrication.  In early 2015, SUSS also joined Georgia Tech’s Packaging Research Center (PRC) where advanced exposure tools, including excimer laser ablation systems, are utilized for via drilling on non-photosensitive materials.  Initial results of the collaboration on via drilling will be jointly presented by Suss and PRC at IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in San Diego on May 26~29, 2015.

“Georgia Tech’s IEN maintains a leading research facility and is part of the NSF-funded National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NINN) formed by 14 US universities”, states Dr. Oliver Brand, Executive Director of IEN. “The addition of this new technology will provide needed functionality for our bio-medical and micro-fluidic research by enhancing our soft lithography capabilities with a wide number of related nanotechnology applications.  IEN is dedicated to providing access to this state-of-the-art facility and technology workshops to outside industrial users.  It is also Georgia Tech’s vision to train a local workforce for the growing demand in the nanotechnology industry, particularly in the US Southeast region”.

“Excimer laser ablation provides a simple solution for imaging on non-photo-sensitive materials without the high cost of conventional photolithography where multiple coating, exposure, developing and etching processes are required”, says Professor Rao Tummala, Director of Packaging Research Center at Georgia Tech. “We are fortunate to have access to advanced exposure tools like excimer laser ablation systems to demonstrate smaller features such as via drilling down to 1um “.

“Many engineers and researchers get to know SUSS MicroTec through their first experiences with our machines at undergraduate or graduate schools”, says Ralph Zoberbier, General Manager Exposure and Laser Processing at SUSS MicroTec. "We are excited to deepen our relationship with the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is a leading industrial research partner for the high potential growth markets of bio-medical and emerging advanced packaging applications, like 3D-IC, 2.5D interposer solutions and panel size packing”.

"I could not be more honored to receive this recognition from President Obama,” said May. “Mentoring engineering students and broadening participation among underrepresented groups has been a pillar of my career, and it is truly gratifying for my contributions to be acknowledged. I want to thank the White House and all of the students who have enriched my life in so many ways."

May created the Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering/Science (SURE) program, for which he was granted more than $2.7 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Through SURE, he annually hosted minority students to do research at Georgia Tech in the hopes that they would pursue a graduate degree. More than 73 percent of SURE participants enrolled in graduate school. May was also the creator and director of the Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES) program, for which he was granted over $10 million from NSF to increase the number of African-American Ph.D. recipients produced by Georgia Tech.

The mentors received their awards during a White House ceremony. May is pictured with John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and France A. Córdova, Director of the National Science Foundation.

The Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring is awarded by the White House to individuals and organizations to recognize the crucial role that mentoring plays in the academic and personal development of students studying science and engineering—particularly those who belong to groups that are underrepresented in these fields. By offering their expertise and encouragement, mentors help prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers while ensuring that tomorrow’s innovators represent a diverse pool of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics talent throughout the United States.

Picture credit: National Science Foundation

LINKS:

Chemical Science paper

Chemical & Engineering News highlight

Wu Lab

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

A report from Georgia’s Department of Labor predicts how the Georgia workforce will look in 2020, and it predicts a shift from farmers to careers such as biomedical engineering. The show's host, Celeste Headlee, talks about the job changes coming with Emory finance professor Tom Smith, Ravi Bellamkonda of the Biomedical Engineering department at Georgia Tech, and cotton farmer Matt Coley.

Listen to GPB's June 3, 2015, On Second Thought radio interview below:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Crawford and Turbyfield presented research from their project, called, “Biomechanical comparisons of leukemia cells and their healthy counterparts,” which focused on using a microfluidic chip to separate leukemia cells from healthy white blood cells. 

“The clinical impact of this project has the potential to shift the diagnostic protocol from a bone marrow biopsy, which is what is typical now, and is very painful, to a simple blood sample,” explains Crawford, who has also joined with Turbyfield to start a biomaterials testing company through what they’ve learned as undergraduate researchers in the lab of Todd Sulchek, faculty member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Their company, Vesalius Technologies, LLC, was incorporated in January.

“Cory and I have been working on characterizing disease in a different way,” Crawford says. “In the past, we’ve seen healthy cells and diseased cells being distinguished from each other based on what genes they express, or what proteins they are producing. So this could mean differences in things like what biomolecules are present on the cell’s surface, or what structurally is different about a diseased cell. Does it have a different cellular “skeleton”? Did it shrink in size?

This type of information is definitely helpful and relevant, but until very recently, it’s been the only information we’ve had.”

She continues, “Our lab is focusing on adding a new piece of information to the picture. We measure mechanical properties of cells, and then compare the differences we see in the healthy versus the unhealthy. The explicit mechanical properties we study are stiffness and viscoelasticity, as well as compare size measurements. If people aren’t familiar with viscoelasticity, we’re using it here to describe the rate at which a cell can regain its shape after it is compressed.”

They measure these properties with a technique called Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). These two BME students have become experts in this difficult skill, so 

Sulchek, an assistant professor based in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, suggested they start a company. Vesalius Technologies will provide measurements that can used “for anything from FDA regulations to patent law infringement legal cases,” according to Crawford.

In their study, the students proved there were differences in the mechanics between healthy and cancerous cells, using a microfluidic chip (‘lab on a chip’) the Sulcheck lab had developed to separate cells. “We knew if we flowed a sample containing cancerous cells through the chip, we should be able to isolate stiffer, healthy cells from softer cancerous ones,” Crawford says. “This is revolutionary in terms of diagnostics. Using this technology, we are able to envision a day where you go to the doctor and find if you have cancer from a blood test.”

Crawford and Turbyfield plan to continue their studies this summer, using blood samples from patients with leukemia. They also want to grow their company. All of it, they both agree, has been made possible through the professional connections, hands on experience, and entrepreneurial focus at BME.

“The best part about the biomedical engineering program here at Tech is the fact that it is always evolving,” Turbyfield says. “The professors and administrators are always on the look out for new and better ways to teach and support the students that make up this department. It is reassuring to know that you are part of a program that cares so deeply about your success as an individual.”

In addition to their award at the symposium, and their recently minted company, Crawford and Turbyfield are both PURA award recipients and have served as teaching assistants for BMED 2300, the Engineering Design class. 

Ultimately, the wide-ranging BME undergraduate experience has opened doors of discovery and opportunity for these two, bringing them to the brink of uncharted territory. “Undergraduate research has been my best experience at Georgia Tech,” says Turbyfield. “I have had the opportunity to work on the fringe of cancer research with cutting edge technology and brilliant minds. Kaci and I are uncovering knowledge that was previously unknown to the world and it is beyond exciting.” 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Yoganathan recently won a Standards Developer Award from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI).

According to AAMI, Yoganathan was honored for his ongoing work on revising standards for cardiac valve repair devices, as well as developing a risk assessment paradigm for medical devices. He’s been working on U.S. and ISO Heart Valve Standards for more than 30 years.

“I am truly honored by this award, since it recognizes my passion for impacting human lives,” Yoganathan told AAMI. “This is my research philosophy: from bench to bedside.”

Earlier this year, Yoganathan was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering for his work and achievements in the biomechanics of prosthetic heart valves and the development of heart repair devices.

AAMI is a nonprofit organization founded in 1967. It is a diverse community of nearly 7,000 professionals united by one mission – the development, management, and use of safe and effective healthcare technology. 

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Children with physical disabilities, but who possess the ability to swing a golf club, will have an opportunity to play the game of golf using this car. The project was sponsored by CSF, E-Z-GO, and Jones Global Sports. Bob Jones IV, Psy.D., the grandson of legendary golfer Bobby Jones, said, “This car allows people with physical challenges to get out and enjoy this fantastic game. It is a wonderful and exciting thing. I am very proud to see this contribution being made by my grandfather’s alma mater Georgia Tech.” His grandfather suffered from syringomylelia (a spinal disorder) later in life.

E-Z-GO donated the car to the Georgia Tech team. Steven Meyer, product manager from E-Z-GO, said, “This is the perfect project for our company because it allows us to partner with a great school like Georgia Tech to develop their engineering students, help a great charity, and grow the game of golf.” 

The goal of the Bobby Jones Classic Golf Car project was to develop a newly imagined, lighter and more cost-effective device that would enable children and adults who live with differing levels of paralysis to play golf and remain physically active and healthy. The car features a custom designed swivel seat with 45-degree forward actuation, 85-degree outward rotation, and an upper body and lower body belted harness system. The golf car provides users with unparalleled ease of play. Novel hand controls allow users to control the acceleration and braking of the car with a special turtle mode for optimal green movement. Most importantly, the golf car provides users with a strong sense of independence and loads of fun.

“The students who developed this concept interviewed subject matter experts and disabled children to ensure its safety, comfort, and ergonomics,” said Dorothy Poppe, executive director of CSF. “As the parent of a young adult with a spinal disorder, this is a breakthrough for kids suffering from paralysis. Its applications are vast and makes sports, particularly the game of golf, a once seemingly impossible physical activity possible.”

Joe Le Doux and James Rains, faculty members of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) were on hand at the event. Rains, BME’s Director of Capstone, introduced features and technical specifications associated with the new car design to the crowd of onlookers. And it turns out that Le Doux, associate professor, was nearly a scratch golfer in his youth. So, Le Doux was in his element. And so was Bobby Baird, the young golfer who gave the car its test run, a living, breathing example of why CSF and Georgia Tech are working together on this project.

“We came up with the idea of creating a handicap friendly car for children because they did not have an opportunity to play golf at a younger age,” said Paul Farrell, chairman and founding member of CSF, who is battling the same disease that Jones had. “CSF is very proud to be part of the project with Georgia Tech. The students did a phenomenal job. And you can see the car gives children of approximately any age the opportunity to play golf.”

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

The electromagnetically shielded in vivo extracellular electrophysiology rig is constructed with various elements, including Zesis surgical microscopes, a 128-channel Tucker Davis Technologies data acquisition system (RZ2), Kopf stereotaxic frames, and DC temperature controllers to enable stable, reliable and high-quality recordings. Also, a complete LED driver system (Thorlabs) was equipped to this rig to facilitate optogenetic in vivo experiments.
Automatic patch clamping devices (autopatchers) are also attached to both in vitro and in vivo patch clamping rigs to obtain high yield and high quality whole cell recordings.  

Forest and Stanley, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), were awarded BRAIN Initiative funding from the NIH for their project entitled, “In-vivo circuit activity measurement at single cell, sub-threshold resolution,” research that could only happen with the best tools available.

“We can use these tools not only to record what’s happening in cells, at the level of a single cell, but also in cells that are in two different brain regions simultaneously,” says Forest. “In each region we can record activity within a single cell, at the sub-threshold resolution of a single cell. No one’s been able to do that before. We can record cells talking to each other in a living brain.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

“This trip offers a unique way to introduce students to a number of different, important experiences,” says Mark Prausnitz, director of the Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery (CD4) at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “But mostly, it provides them with an up-close look at state-of-the-art pharmaceutical manufacturing processes in action that they have learned about in the classroom.”

Prausnitz and CD4 Associate Director Andreas Bommarius, both professors in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, led last month’s Puerto Rico field trip, part of a class they teach called Drug Design, Development and Delivery (D4). From the start, the class was designed to be interdisciplinary, bringing in students from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The Puerto Rico trip that Prausnitz and Bommarius have organized for the past eight years has become an important rite of spring for students interested in learning more about the pharmaceutical industry. The five-day trip also is the reason that Prausnitz and Bommarius were named winners of the 2015 Innovation in Co-Curricular Education Award from the Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, which recognizes faculty who increase student learning outside the traditional setting.

Students who choose to go on the trip (travel contingent is limited to about 25) get a rare and comprehensive look at Puerto Rico’s burgeoning biotech industry, which features some of the world’s top drug and device manufacturing facilities and companies, such as AbbVie, Amgen, Medtronic and Merck.

“Students get to interact with the industry professionals who operate and, in some cases, developed these manufacturing processes, thereby gaining a deeper understating of the profession,” Prausnitz says. “And they get to have these experiences in the context of the rich Puerto Rican culture, which provides additional new experiences.”

For some students, like Monica Perez Cuevas, it’s an opportunity to learn a little more about their own backyard.

“The trip had an added benefit for me, because I’m actually from Puerto Rico,” says Perez Cuevas, a first-year graduate student in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “It’s a great advantage getting to see, first hand, how things work in the pharmaceutical industry. It gives you great perspective on what biomedical research is about, and we really did have first-hand exposure.”

She adds, “I mean, here’s a machine right in front of your face, and here are the experts telling us how it works, why it was built this way – all of the technical aspects we discussed in class, right there in front of us. This is the kind of experience that will help me make an informed decision later on when I consider my career options.”

Thomas Ng, a third-year BME undergraduate student, says that deep dive into the manufacturing process is, “an eye-opening experience, because you’re seeing the process from start to finish.”

For Angel Cobos, a recent graduate in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the opportunity to speak with industry professionals was key, and he found the panel discussion with human resources people at Amgen especially interesting.

“These are executives and experts who basically told us how to get our foot in the door,” says Cobos, who has a job lined up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but says he’s also interested in pursuing a Ph.D. down the road and is considering a career in academia. “They sat us down and gave us an overview of what they did and how they got where they are in their careers. These were people who are really successful in this industry, and they were willing to answer all of our questions. You don’t typically get that kind of access.”

According to Ng, the spring trip was mostly, “work, work, work, on the bus by 7:30 in the morning, and by the time you’re done touring facilities, get back at 7, get dinner around 8, you’re tired. Some us managed to do some fun stuff, though.”

Some of the fun stuff – that is, the non-biotech study, study, study stuff – has become part of the annual spring tradition, such as trips to Old San Juan, the bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, and a tour of the Bacardi Rum Distillery. But the group’s first stop on the trip, the first day they arrived, was the Arecibo Observatory, home of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, and it never fails to leave an impression.

“It’s in the middle of nowhere, this huge crater, a thousand-foot wide dish collecting radio signals from outer space,” says Cobos. “We packed in as much as we could for five days, but this was an absolutely stunning way to start the trip.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

“Support from The Marcus Foundation will enable us to accelerate the development of a novel tumor monorail device to treat brain tumors in patients,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, Wallace H. Coulter Chair in Biomedical Engineering and lead investigator of this project. “Research labs such as ours are set up to achieve scientific and engineering breakthroughs, but for these breakthroughs to reach patients, we need to follow good manufacturing practices, rigorous safety and quality testing, adhere to FDA guidelines for obtaining regulatory approvals, and design appropriate clinical trials. All of these processes are going to be greatly enhanced and accelerated with this critical and visionary Marcus Foundation support.”

Funding from The Marcus Foundation will enable researchers to move this technology into clinical trials and ultimately to people who are facing these medical challenges. The grant will also enable device design and prototyping, development of an FDA-compliant manufacturing process and FDA approvals for a clinical Investigational New Drug (IND) study to be conducted in Atlanta.

Critical support for the project was provided by Ian’s Friends Foundation, an Atlanta-based non-profit that supports pediatric brain tumor research. The monorail project was inspired by a desire to treat pediatric brain tumors. The research may also be applied to adult brain tumors.

Over the past five years, the research team has demonstrated that the tumor monorail device is capable of significantly reducing tumor load in rodent brains, by guiding tumors to grow into a specially designed “gel sink.” This study, published in Nature Materials in 2014, received worldwide media attention and interest.

The interdisciplinary research team includes Bellamkonda and his laboratory based at Georgia Tech; Dr. Barun Brahma, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; and Dr. Tobey McDonald, Emory Pediatrics and AFLAC Cancer Center. Harold Solomon from Georgia Tech’s VentureLab is providing product development leadership.

The project exemplifies Georgia Tech and Atlanta’s unparalleled strength in developing innovative technologies to better child health – a burgeoning area of research known as “pediatric bioengineering.”

“On behalf of our lab, our collaborators and most importantly all the patients that may benefit from this therapy, I am deeply grateful to The Marcus Foundation for their vision and commitment to accelerate the development of our breakthrough research so it can reach patients faster than it would have otherwise,” said Bellamkonda.

Ian’s Friends Foundation, which supports pediatric brain tumor research, sponsored a competition on April 30 focusing on issues associated with pediatric brain cancer. Students presented their work before a panel of medical doctors, engineers, and a spectrum of biomedical educators. 

The winning team, VenTrickle, presented a novel wireless pressure communicating cerebral shunt product called CranioCheck, which is designed to instantly alert patients if cerebrospinal fluid pressure increases to unsafe levels. CranioCheck consists of sensors, a tiny battery, and wireless Bluetooth technology to communicate with a customized phone app. The judges felt this product could make a significant impact in the medical device industry.

The winning team, consisting of Bailey Ernstes, Jacob Kazlow, and Carrie Simpson, received a $5,000 first-place award from Ian’s Friends Foundation.

The second place team, Coalesce, won $1,000 for its redesigned spinal implant that uses dentin as a spinal fusion material. Team members are Beth Carpenter, Naser Ibrahim, Kavya Muddukumar, and Karthik Nathan. The third place team, VerteVision, won $500 for an automated allograft bone shaping machine envisioned for use in the operating room. Team members are Katie Byrum, Cambre Kelly, Greg O’Neal, and Becky Wyche.

“I thought the competition was incredible,” said Phil Yagoda, founder of Ian’s Friends Foundation. “For students that have no prior knowledge of pediatric brain tumors and associated medical issues, and to be able to get up to speed and then actually create innovative products in such a short time, is a testament to the program and professors in the BME department. It was difficult to select a winner from among the great projects. Georgia Tech and Emory have been great partners over the years that care so much about getting positive results.” 

Yagoda and his wife Cheryl established Ian’s Friends Foundation when their then two-year old son, Ian, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The foundation’s mission is to undertake and support initiatives at research institutions around the country, focusing on the development of new therapeutic methodologies and treatments for pediatric brain tumors.

“We are so impressed by the minds at Georgia Tech and Emory. Every student team came up with amazing projects,” said Cheryl Yagoda. “These projects are the future of science and will help children and doctors in the operating room for years to come.”

You can find information about Ian’s Friends Foundation here:
iansfriendsfoundation.com

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience